Page 36 - 2024-25 Travel Guide to Canada

Food: A Taste
of Canada
BY MARGARET SWAINE
ALBERTA PATIO DINING • DESTINATION
CANADA©NORTHGROVECREATIVE
The culinary travel scene in Canada boasts delicious
taste trails and unique regional dishes from coast to
coast. Creative young chefs reinterpret Canada’s
regional dishes, showcase ethnic influences and play
with exotic spicing. Heirloom produce from local farms,
indigenous wild foods foraged from the forests, organic
meats and fresh seafood fished from the oceans and
lakes are among their cherished ingredients.
BRITISH COLUMBIA
BOUNTY FROM THE OCEAN,
FORESTS & LAND
Specialties on the menu in British Columbia
include wild salmon, golden honey mussels,
spot prawns, geoduck, BC bison, Fraser
Valley duck and Salt Spring Island lamb.
There is a wide range of guided culinary
tours—sometimes led by chefs—in southern
B.C., particularly near the Okanagan Valley,
Cowichan Valley and Fraser Valley. City
tasting tours in Victoria, Vancouver and
Whistler visit restaurants and culinary
neighbourhoods (www.hellobc.com).
Cornucopia Whistler is an annual 11-day
indulgence of local food and drink that pairs
homegrown chefs with top B.C. producers,
breweries, distilleries and wineries
(www.whistlercornucopia.com).
Fox and Monocle, a café serving modern
European cuisine in North Saanich, was in
the top ten Canada’s Best New Restaurants
2022 by Air Canada’s enRoute magazine
(enroute.aircanada.com/en/restaurants).
In Victoria, Off the Eaten Track offers
foodie tours such as the the Eat Like a
Canadian and Modern Chinatown Food
and History tours (www.offtheeatentrack
tours.ca). On the Wild Foraging tours in
spring and summer, offered by Swallow Tail
Culinary Tours, participants discover native
B.C. ingredients in the forest: fiddleheads,
licorice fern, big leaf maple flowers, nettles,
oyster mushrooms and wild chamomile, to
name a few (www.swallowtail.ca).
THE PRAIRIES
GRASSLAND GRAINS AND
RANCHLAND MEATS
Manitoba’s Parkland region has a self-guided
Cinnamon Bun Trail with eight trail stops
along the way (www.parklandtourism.com/
attraction-category/cinnamon-bun-trail/).
In season, Winnipeg’s Exchange District BIZ
offers tours to some of their more than 50
delectable one-of-a-kind restaurants
(www.exchangedistrict.org/food-tours).
West End BIZ covers the eateries in the west
end of the city (www.westendbiz.ca/west-
end-restaurant-tours).
Saskatchewan has more than 40 percent
of Canada’s cultivated farmland and
Saskatoon’s culinary scene takes full
advantage of it. Hearth Restaurant, on
Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list in 2022
and 2020, features refined prairie classics
(www.hearth.restaurant). The Night Oven
Bakery which uses local, organic and
heirloom grains such as red fife, mills the
flour in-house and bakes in a wood-fired
brick oven, puts out the best breads and
pastries imaginable (www.thenightoven.ca).
In Alberta, as Canada’s ranch heartland,
elk, bison, wild boar, caribou and beef—
which many refer to as Canadian Rocky
Mountain Cuisine—are plentiful. Canadian
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