Matamak

Mamdouh Dahab’s journey from Egypt to successful restaurant ownership in Canada is an odyssey. He graduated from French culinary school in Cairo in 1984 and taught cooking. “Then I decided to leave because it was my dream to travel either to England or to the United States of America,” Mamdouh explains. He left Egypt in 1990 for the U.S. and worked there for nearly five years before coming to Canada in 1994, at the encouragement of his teacher from Egypt: “At that time, he was the executive sous chef at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Toronto. I came and got a job at the Novotel Hotel.”

Three years later, Mamdouh went on to work at the Fairmont Hot Springs Resort in British Columbia; a restaurant and golf course in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta; the Novotel in Toronto; and a restaurant near Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2000, he had young children and envisioned Canada as the ideal place to raise them, so he returned to Canada and came to Hamilton. He liked Westdale Village because it reminded him of New Haven. “I had a restaurant like this close to Yale University. I found out there was a university here too [McMaster] and I said it’s a good choice to open a business in this area.”