Heydays at The June Motel by Freddy Laliberté and Evan Bauch with Katie Laliberté and Emma Baulch

If you think summer is the perfect time for cocktails and zesty snacks, you may be the target audience for the latest brand extension of The June Motel Empire. Perhaps best known from the 2021 six-episode Netflix series, Motel Makeover, The June Motel is a boutique hoteling experience blending 1970s nostalgia, Instagrammable design, and choice drinkies and snackies.

The reality show featured the transformation of a 40-year-old beachside motel in Sauble Beach into a sunset toned getaway for girls’ weekends and sultry romantic escapes. The show also told the origin story for Heydays, the motel’s restaurant, which is the source of the cookbook here under review. Now you can bring The June Hotel experience right into your own kitchen. First, stock up on Rosé!

Heydays at The June Motel includes enough tasty snack and meal ideas to plan out events from May through September. Starters, salads, soups, bread, sides, brunch, desserts — and two sections for drinks and alcohol adjacent: bevvies and cocktail party. The emphasis here is on fun, flavour, and a return to a simpler time. The recipes do not include calorie counts or nutritional tables. Just enjoy the time travel and the buzz.

Needing to avoid shellfish myself, I skipped many of the seafood bon bons and sought something simple I could test for readers. Most of the recipes are set up to provide settings of four, though there is some variation. The Classic Eggs Benny was easy to follow and tasty. The selection of cocktails was classic and well-chosen, the Bloody Mary spot on.

The cookbook includes memories of how the restaurant opened in 2020 in the early days of the COVID pandemic. “What we quickly realized,” the authors write, “was that it didn’t take much to create beautiful memories … Heydays is about celebration and more specifically, celebrating unforgettable summer moments with the people you love.” Amen to that. Saddle up at the picnic table, uncork that bottle, create some memories following the directions laid out here by the Heydays crew.

FREDDY LALIBERTÉ opened numerous food concepts in Toronto prior to relocating to Sauble Beach to open Heydays. He researched and developed recipes for the hard-hitting classics that customers keep coming back for, and specializes in sourcing excellent products and keeping quality high in all our Heydays dishes.

EVAN BAULCH is an operational mastermind in charge of pulling all the pieces of complex restaurant operations together and keeping things running smoothly day to day. His vast experience in high-end hospitality establishments in Toronto and the Guelph area helped him to develop the practices that weave rhythm, routine, and consistency in all that we do.

KATIE LALIBERTÉ spent weekends in 2020 working the Heydays patio and leverages her day-job skills to support all the tech systems that make up a busy restaurant. She’s a writer and sometime bookseller, and is currently working on a restaurant romance!

EMMA BAULCH has long been known for her tastemaking culinary prowess and is now responsible for finding and hiring our staff, creating the best hospitality teams in Bruce County. She is our queen of desserts and our forever HR expert.

Publisher: House of Anansi Press (May 21, 2024)
Hardcover 8″ x 10″ | 304 pages
ISBN: 9781487011642

Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.

Michael Bryson

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