Earlier this year, food critic and author cnutsmith set out on a 50-restaurant eating jag to uncover Canada’s 20 best restaurants. Everywhere he ate, he watched for warm service, reasonable value, spectacular cooking and—joy. Here's where he found it:
River Café’s ingredients come from local farms, ranches and dairies. Among the highlights: smoked sablefish from Kyuquot Sound with salt-baked celery root and keta salmon with caviar, cucumber and dill oil .
The cooking, from executive chef Scott MacKenzie, is all about the sourcing. River Café’s menu is peppered with the names of local farms and ranches and small-scale cheese dairies; the restaurant was a pioneer of local, thoughtful sourcing, not merely in Alberta, but Canada as a whole. So the parsnips that come puréed with the B.C.
As the dining business began to settle early this year into a new post-pandemic normal, I set out on an epic, 50-restaurant, coast-to-coast eating jag for, gorging my way from Quidi Vidi, Newfoundland, to Ucluelet, B.C. The intention: to take the temperature of the country’s remade dining landscape—and to uncover Canada’s most spectacular restaurants along the way.
That mid-range, suddenly more expensive almost across the board, has taken a hit in pricier centres, Toronto in particular. Independent, original, professionally run places where you could eat well on a weeknight without too much sticker shock used to be one of the city’s strengths. Now, squeezed by rising food, labour, construction, financing, maintenance and rent costs, a lot of those restaurants have either closed or raised their prices to what many diners consider special-occasion heights.
On the plus side, at least some of those bigger dinner bills are paying for long-overdue changes across the industry: higher wages and once unheard-of benefits for many restaurant workers. The four-day workweek has become increasingly common, especially at upper mid-range and higher-end spots. Though 12- and 14-hour shifts are standard still, many cooks can now count on three days of built-in downtime. These aren’t fads.
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