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Sophia and chef Andi Preuss opened Oxalis in November 2021, in a two-storey former house at 22 Wentworth Street.
Sophia and chef Andi Preuss opened Oxalis in November 2021, in a two-storey former house at 22 Wentworth Street.
Andi apprenticed as a chef in Saxony and was cooking in a Berlin steakhouse kitchen at fourteen. He met Sophia, who is from Austria, while both were working at a resort there. Nova Scotia came next: a job at Trout Point Lodge, where Andi valued the small kitchen and the time it gave him with guests. They fell for the province, for downtown Dartmouth and for what Nova Scotia grows and lands.
Steakhouse kitchen internship, age 14
Andi's chef apprenticeship
Resort kitchen. Andi and Sophia meet
The move to Nova Scotia
Oxalis opens at 22 Wentworth Street
Best restaurant in HRM, Nova Scotia Restaurant Awards
Oxalis describes its menu as ever-evolving, built around purposeful ingredients from land to sea. That means the kitchen follows what is actually good now rather than forcing the same plates through every season.
Andi's brief for the dining room, as he put it to Signal HFX: guests should feel “like friends and family.” The plates can be intricate; the room stays informal.
That is the thread running through the room: a small restaurant in downtown Dartmouth, drawing from European memory and the ingredients of Nova Scotia.
See what they're cooking →