AG Inspired Cuisine

AG Inspired Cuisine grows much of what it serves and keeps bees for the rest, and the kitchen lets both decide what dinner looks like from one week to the next. The dining room sits on the lower level of the Sterling Inn & Spa, a few turns off the Falls tourist path, and it opens only for dinner — a Niagara Falls table built for the unhurried end of the day. Produce comes from AG Farm on the city's outskirts; honey comes from an on-site apiary and turns up both on the plate and for sale by the door. Even the tables carry the idea, built from recycled chopsticks. The wine list stays close to home, drawn from Niagara VQA bottles chosen to match a menu that never holds still.

That restlessness has a source. Executive chef Cory Linkson runs the kitchen around the growing season, and a staff farmer, Macy Lacasse, works the land on permaculture principles so vegetables can be cut and plated the same day. Linkson has described the approach, in local reporting, as taking seasonal and local cooking to a hyper-extent — less a sourcing line on the menu than the reason the menu exists. He came up cooking as a teenager in the commissary of his parents' St. Catharines pizzeria, and the food here reads as an argument he has been making ever since: that a Niagara restaurant should put the region's farmers and the character of its soil on the plate. When the asparagus is ready, it is on the menu; when it is gone, so is the dish.