About

unsweetened.ca is a playground for Alexa Clark, her experiences, her meals, her friends, and her life. Alexa is a Food Writer and Best-selling Author. Alexa has a lifelong passion for great food served well. Alexa has been blogging on unsweetened.ca since 2004, so you will find a lot about food, travel and restaurants, and lots of random tidbits about Alexa, her friends, her passions and her family. Alexa splits her time between downtown Toronto and a small rural island in New Brunswick.

Alexa Clark & Food

Alexa Clark grew up on an organic farm and in restaurant kitchens. She has worked front of the house, back of the house, and from farm to fryer.  She is the Creator and Publisher of CheapEats Restaurant Guide and Managing Partner of Plethora Press, past Co-Chair of Second Harvest’s Toronto Taste, co-founder of HoHoTO  and co-founder & organiser of the Secret Pickle Supper Club.

Alexa’s culinary adventures started early one Sunday morning when she decided to make her parents scrambled eggs in an electric skillet. Ingredients? 1 dozen eggs, 1lb of butter, 1 bottle of soy sauce. Luckily the skillet was off. So was breakfast. However, her love of greasy-spoon breakfasts was born that fateful morning.

Alexa started working in the food industry at the age of 5, selling organic vegetables in the Saint John City Market with her chef/farmer father. By 13, she was working in her first professional kitchen. She wrote her first cookbook, exclusively for friends and family, in 2000. Waitressing her way through a BMath at the University of Waterloo, Alexa started her career working in interactive technologies and in 1997 she founded Ellipsis Interactive Consulting – one of Canada’s first exclusively New Media focused talent agencies. Alexa leveraged her high-tech career to subsidise eating her way through the finest restaurants and diviest of dives everywhere she went. Saturday mornings were spent chasing down the best greasy spoon breakfasts and lunch hours were consumed searching for Chinatown’s best char sui fun and dim sum.

With her partner, Gerry Thorpe, Alexa founded Plethora Press, a publishing company which publishes her best-selling restaurant guides – CheapEats Restaurant Guides  – CheapEats Toronto and CheapEats Ottawa.  With over 15,000 copies sold of CheapEats Toronto & CheapEats Ottawa, the CheapEats books and blog network are innovative and renowned resources for Ontario foodies. 

In 2010 Alexa organised a birthday dinner with Chef Matt Kantor cooking and called it the Secret Pickle for an insider joke.  It turned into a social media phenomenon and The Secret Pickle Supper Club was born.  The Secret Pickle Supper Club helmed by Alexa and partner Chef Matt Kantor has turn into one of the hottest underground dining tickets in Toronto.

Alexa has judged many culinary competitions including the San Pellegrino Almost Famous Chef competition, Taste Canada Cooks the Books competition,  the Discovered Culinary Competition at Nella Cucina, Rickard’s Griller of Glory BBQ competition, Feed Tomorrow’s Wrap Up With Rice competition, and the Butter Tart Grand Champion competition at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair.

Alexa Clark & Consulting

Alexa is a Content Marketing Strategist, but that just scratches the surface of her 25-year career mainly spent as a serial, social entrepreneur.

Alexa started out in the late 80s doing research to develop some of the technologies that we take for granted today – voice recognition (SIRI/Alexa), cell phone technology, and streaming video across the internet. Her career shifted and twisted, as many people’s do, through the changes in interests, technology and life.

Alexa founded and ran one of the first exclusively New Media focused talent agencies in Canada. Created and publishes the best-selling CheapEats Restaurant Guide series. Created and ran theApprenticeBlog.com for 5 seasons then sold it as a business on eBay.  Co-founded HoHoTO – the party twitter built, BookCampTO – an unconference on the future of books and publishing, and the Secret Pickle Supper Club – one of Toronto’s first underground supper clubs. She spent 2 years as Co-Chair of Toronto Taste which raises $850,000+ annually for Second Harvest by bringing together food lovers and the top Chefs, best beverages and most exciting restaurants in the hospitality industry.

As a consultant, Alexa has been providing winning strategies for almost 20 years to clients in the food, start-up and tech industries. Her clients know her to be an accomplished communicator, leader, and an innovative, strategic thinker with a demonstrated ability to reach stakeholders at all levels.

Acknowledged as a pioneering adopter of social media with a lifelong passion for great food, a  deep background in building interactive technologies for major brands, and a natural talent for connecting people, Alexa has established a strong reputation in a number of overlapping online communities. In 2009, Alexa was named one of the 20 leading women in Social Media in Canada.

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