INNOVATORS

Adriano Ciotoli takes on the challenge of turning a blue-collar town into a destination for cycling connoisseurs of wine, craft beer and food

Adriano Ciotoli turns a blue-collar town into a food haven.

Most people reacted with a raised eyebrow or a head scratch when Adriano Ciotoli launched a business promoting local food in the Windsor-Essex County region. His WindsorEats operates an online directory of independent restaurants and offers cycling tours of wineries and breweries in the southwestern corner of Ontario, but there wasn’t exactly a lot of demand for the service when the business launched 10 years ago. Windsorites generally think a drive to a chain restaurant is in order if someone suggests going out to eat in this blue-collar town.

But Ciotoli was watching the local food movement explode worldwide and saw the potential for marketing the region’s ample wineries and farmers’ fields. With some web design skills and a little hustle, he turned out to be right: WindsorEats regularly sells out its cycling tours and has won multiple awards for bringing precious tourist dollars to an economically struggling region. “For the first couple of years… just to put it bluntly, it was like hitting our heads against a wall,” Ciotoli says. “There really has been a huge shift in terms of people’s perceptions of eating locally.”

Ciotoli, 34, says his love for food runs through his Italian blood. He dreamed of becoming a chef, but a kitchen accident convinced him to rethink a career that involved handling sharp objects. Graduating from college in a very tough job market, he decided to start a business instead of pounding the pavement with résumés. He says WindsorEats was partly inspired by the regular dilemma he and his girlfriend faced when trying to decide where to go out for dinner and only finding bare-bones, out-ofdate information online.

Trying to explain the concept of an online restaurant directory that didn’t include chain restaurants was a challenge, Ciotoli says. “Everyone — I’m saying literally everyone, I think even my parents at one point — said it wasn’t going to work,” he says. “We kept on getting questions like, ‘What about this chain? Why wouldn’t you have that one?’”

If promoting independent restaurants was a little weird for Windsor to handle, the concept of cycling tourism was off the deep end. The car is king in the automotive city, where more people drive to work and fewer people commute by public transit or bicycle than in any other Canadian urban area. As a result, Ciotoli wasn’t expecting more than 10 people to sign up for the first Wine Trail Ride six years ago — a bike tour that stops for wine tastings at Essex County wineries and ends with an outdoor group dinner featuring local food. Instead, all 35 spots were snapped up within a week. “It was immediately apparent that we had created something that was wanted,” he says.

Today, WindsorEats’ tour schedule is packed. Ciotoli says every monthly Wine Trail Ride has sold out for the past two years, with the company regularly booking additional private rides for corporate excursions, bachelorette parties and birthdays. WindsorEats also recently launched the Windsor Craft Beer Festival, featuring offerings from Ontario breweries. It complements the company’s Bikes and Beers tour, which takes a more urban cycling route to breweries throughout the city.

Anumber Ciotoli likes to cite as evidence of WindsorEats’ value to the local economy is that each five-hour Wine Trail Ride generates about $10,000 in spending, when you factor in the wine people buy on the tour, hotel stays and other expenses. Plenty of tourists participate in the rides, but Ciotoli says about half of his customers are locals.

Ciotoli, who is running for city council in the Oct. 27 election, is not sure why Windsorites were slow to warm up to local food and wine. But now that WindsorEats is helping them find it and try it, they’re realizing they like it. “It was just showing people what we had to offer,” he says.

41