The Nummy Snack Bar opens for business in downtown Saint Andrews on May 5, offering tourists and townspeople a brand-new flavour all year round.
“It’s a takeout and smoothie bar,” says Zainub Faulkner-Malik, who owns and runs Nummy with her husband Ben. Nummy will be located at 24 King St. right by the wharf in the heart of downtown.
The couple is excited to provide several vegetarian offerings at Nummy, as well as some local stick-to-your-ribs fare.
“We’ll be doing power bowls, we’ll be doing charcuterie boxes from the Fundy Foodie, we’re going to do a curry hot dog with crispy onions, and we’re doing a naan-which,” she says. “Healthy, yummy, quick food.”
The Faulkner-Maliks got the idea based on feedback from guests at their original business, the Montague Rose Inn and Tearoom, which they opened in 2021. The couple met while teaching in South Korea and moved to New Brunswick via B.C. They stumbled upon Saint Andrews through a simple Google search for the most charming towns in Canada and decided to make the move to the picture province, renovating the historic 1859-built property located on Montague Street.
But they began to notice that their visitors didn’t always have a lot of options for food, let alone the warming curries Zainub grew up with back in Vancouver with her Pakistani family.
Then the lightbulb moment happened.
“We’ve been doing a curry service from our house weekly,” she says, explaining how the idea to start a full-fledged standalone takeout was born. “We put up a post on our Instagram because we had a potluck and made a curry.”
With a food preparation license already in hand for the items they prepared for the Tearoom, they asked if anyone who followed them would like to try it.
“The post just blew up.”
When they went from preparing 20 servings of curry on a weekly basis to 75, they decided they needed to make the jump to being restauranteurs as well.
“People are all for it, people like the vegetarian options, people like the curry,” she says. “There’s no Indian restaurant anywhere near Saint Andrews and people are just eating it up so much.”
Zainub says she’s not a fan of a lot of spice in her curry but that the people of Saint Andrews seem to want a lot. They’ve settled on a medium spiciness so that it packs a pinch instead of a punch.
The plan is for Nummy to be open pretty much year-round (with a possible break during the January-February period) and for it to be open earlier in the week when many of the more tourist-oriented restaurants don’t have as many hours. She says Nummy will also be a destination for families with small children, like theirs, who can’t do sit-down meals at restaurants.
The info Faulkner-Malik’s gleaned from their guests helped them decide how to fill the market gaps in the Saint Andrews restaurant scene.
“We had a really good insider peak,” Zainub says. “They’d say ‘I’m craving this’ or ‘I’d love to have this’ and often it was on a Monday or Tuesday.”
As a result, Nummy will be open Monday and Tuesday and closed on Wednesday as other restaurants pick up the slack later in the week.
They’ve hired three employees to help them out with the new endeavour, some of whom they met at the St. Stephen job fair that was held earlier this year.
Ben, who hails from England and recently received his Canadian citizenship, says New Brunswick has been extremely welcoming of their ideas and entrepreneurship.
“The town makes it easy to do something new, which is great. As soon as we pop up a post with an idea, the support that comes from the people around us is overwhelming. And that’s just having moved here two years ago. We feel like the connections we have here are so strong. It’s exactly what we’re looking for.”
Alex Graham is a reporter with Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
