About Hoops & Grill
A magazine for the whole game night: the basketball, the food, the beer and the people you watch it with.
Hoops & Grill started from a simple complaint. Sports writing tells you who won, food writing tells you how to roast a chicken for four, and nobody tells you how to get forty wings crisp before a 7:30 tip, which beer still tastes good in the third hour of a broadcast, or why the room went quiet a second before the shot dropped. We write about the space between those beats.
What we cover
- Basketball: tactics explained without the jargon, eras and players, and how to read a game on a screen.
- Game day: watch parties, viewing rooms, timing and the logistics of a full house.
- Bar food and recipes: wings, nachos, burgers, dips and live fire, cooked and timed before we print a number.
- Craft beer and drinks: styles, pairings and the alcohol-free options that finally taste like something.
- Sports culture: fans, rivalries, rituals and the rooms where strangers celebrate together.
- Business and lifestyle: how bars and food businesses work, what the jobs are like and life around the schedule.
How we work
Recipes are cooked, usually more than once, and the temperatures we give are the ones we used. Basketball pieces come from games we watched, rewound and charted. When we describe a general rule (how much food a crowd eats, how far to sit from a screen) we say it is a rule of thumb, because it is. We do not take payment for coverage, and we do not run reviews written to sell a product.
We are based in Toronto, a hockey city that learned to love basketball, and we write for fans across Canada and the United States. New articles go up in the Playbook most weeks, and the longer guides live on their own pages: the game-day food guide, the fan's calendar, where to watch and the gallery.
The crew
Andre Whitfield
Andre played club basketball through university in Ontario and has charted games with a notebook and a remote ever since. He writes about tactics, eras and the small things that make a game easier to read on a screen.
Megan Tremblay
Megan worked the fryer and the flat-top in busy pub kitchens before she moved into recipe testing. She writes about wings, nachos, burgers and live fire, with timings and temperatures that hold up at home.
Luis Ferreira
Luis spent ten years pouring beer behind busy bars and judging at homebrew competitions. He covers styles, pairings, draught lines and the alcohol-free options that finally got good.
Priya Nair
Priya writes about fans: watch parties, rivalries, superstitions and the rooms where people gather for a game. She has hosted more playoff nights than her neighbours would like.
Colin MacAulay
Colin ran front-of-house in downtown restaurants for years and now advises small hospitality businesses. He writes about how bars make money, what the work is really like and life around the schedule.
Say hello
Corrections, recipe questions, a basketball argument you want settled: the contact page reaches the whole crew, and we read everything.