Canada's sheer number of restaurants, bars, cafés and fast-food
joints is staggering, but at first sight there's little to distinguish
Canada's mainstream urban cuisine from that of any American metropolis:
the shopping malls, main streets and highways are lined with pan-American
food chains, trying to outdo each other with their bargains and special
offers.
However, it's easy to leave the chain restaurants behind for more
interesting options - increasingly so, as the general standard of
Canadian cooking has improved dramatically in the last few years. In the
big cities there's a plethora of ethnic and speciality restaurants, on
either seaboard the availability of fresh fish and shellfish enlivens
many menus, and even out in the country - once the domain of
unappetizing diners - there's a liberal supply of first-rate, family-run
cafés and restaurants, especially in the more touristy areas. Non-smokers
may also be relieved to know that almost every café and restaurant has a
nonsmoking area and increasing numbers don't allow smoking at all
Breakfast
Breakfast is taken very seriously all over Canada, and with prices
averaging between $5 and $12 it's often the best-value and most filling
meal of the day. Whether you go to a café, coffee shop or hotel snack
bar, the breakfast menu, on offer until around 11am, is a fairly
standard fry-up - eggs in various guises, ham or bacon, streaky and
fried to a crisp, or skinless and bland sausages (except for Nova
Scotia's famous Lunenburg sausage, a hot spicy version pioneered by
settlers from Europe). Whatever you order, you nearly always receive a
dollop of fried potatoes (called hash browns or sometimes home fries).
Other favourite breakfast options include English muffins or, in posher
places, bran muffins, a glutinous fruitcake made with bran and sugar,
and waffles or pancakes , swamped in butter with lashings of maple
syrup. Also, because the breakfast/lunch division is never hard and
fast, mountainous meaty sandwiches are common too.
Whatever you eat, you can wash it down with as much coffee as you can
stomach: for the price of the first cup, the waiters/waitresses will -
in most places - keep providing free refills until you beg them to stop.
The coffee is either regular or decaf and is nearly always freshly
ground and very tasty, though lots of the cheaper places dilute it until
it tastes like dishwater. In the big cities, look out also for
specialist coffee shops, where the range of offerings verges on the
bewildering. As a matter of course, coffee comes with cream or
half-and-half (half-cream, half-milk) - if you ask for skimmed milk,
you're often met with looks of disbelief. Tea , with either lemon or
milk, is also drunk at breakfast, and the swisher places emphasize the
English connection by using imported brands - or at least brands that
sound English
Lunch and snacks
Between 11.30am and 2.30pm many big-city restaurants offer special set
menus that are generally excellent value. In Chinese and Vietnamese
establishments, for example, you'll frequently find rice and noodles, or
dim sum feasts for $7 to $10, and many Japanese restaurants give you a
chance to eat sushi very reasonably for under $15. Pizza is also widely
available, from larger chains like Pizza Hut to family-owned restaurants
and pavement stalls. Favourites with white-collar workers are
café-restaurants featuring wholefoods and vegetarian fare, though few
are nutritionally dogmatic, serving traditional meat dishes and
sandwiches too; most have an excellent selection of daily lunch specials
for around $9.
For quick snacks , many delis do ready-cooked food, including a
staggering range of sandwiches and filled bagels. Alternatively,
shopping malls sometimes have ethnic fast-food stalls , a healthier
option (just about) than the inevitable burger chains, whose homogenized
products have colonized every main street in the land. Regional snacks
include fish and chips , especially in Newfoundland; Québec's
traditional thick, yellow pea soup, smoked meat sandwiches and poutine ,
fries covered in melted mozzarella cheese or cheese curds and gravy; and
the Maritimes' ubiquitous clam chowder , a creamy shellfish and potato
soup.
Some city bars are used as much by diners as drinkers, who turn up in
droves to gorge themselves on the free hors d'oeuvres laid out between
5pm and 7pm from Monday to Friday in an attempt to grab commuters. For
the price of a drink you can stuff yourself with pasta and chilli.
Brunch is another deal worth looking out for; a cross between breakfast
and lunch served up in bars at the weekend from around 11am to 2pm. For
a set price ($10 and up) you get a light meal and a variety of
complimentary cocktails or wine.
Main meals
Largely swamped by the more fashionable regional-European and ethnic
cuisines, traditional Canadian cooking relies mainly on local game and
fish, with less emphasis on vegetables and salads. In terms of price,
meals for two without wine average between $25 and $50.
Newfoundland 's staple food is the cod, usually in the form of fish and
chips, supplemented by salmon, halibut and hake and more bizarre dishes
like cod tongues and cheeks, scruncheons (fried cubes of pork fat),
smoked or pickled caplin and seal flipper pie. The island's restaurants
are not usually permitted to sell moose or seal meat, but many islanders
join in the annual licensed shoot and, if you befriend a hunter, you may
end up across the table from a hunk of either animal.
In the Maritimes , lobster is popular everywhere, whether it's boiled or
broiled, chopped up or whole, as are oysters, clams, scallops and
herrings either on their own or in a fish stew or clam chowder. Nova
Scotia is famous for its blueberries, Solomon Gundy (marinated herring),
Annapolis Valley apple pie, fat archies (a Cape Breton molasses cookie)
and rappie pie (an Acadian dish of meat or fish and potatoes). New
Brunswick is known for its fiddleheads (fern shoots) and dulse (edible
seaweed). Fish are Ontario 's most distinctive offering - though the
pollution of the Great Lakes has badly affected the freshwater catch.
Try the whitefish, lake trout, pike and smelt, but bear in mind that
these are easier to come by in the north of the province than in the
south. Pork forms a major part of the Québec diet, both as a spicy pork
pâté known as creton, and in tourtière, a minced pork pie. There are
also splendid thick pea and cabbage soups, beef pies (cipâte), and all
sorts of ways to soak up maple syrup - trempette is bread drenched with
it and topped with fresh cream. And, of course, Québec is renowned for
its outstanding French-style food.
Northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba are the places to try fish like the
goldeye, pickerel and Arctic char, as well as pemmican (a mixture of
dried meat, berries and fat) and fruit pies containing the Saskatoon
berry. The Arctic regions feature caribou steak, and Alberta is also
noted for its beef steaks. Finally, British Columbia cuisine features
Pacific fish and shellfish of many different types, from cod, haddock
and salmon to king crab, oysters and shrimp. Here and there, there's
also the odd native people's restaurant, most conspicuously at the
Wanuskewin Heritage Park in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the
restaurant serves venison, buffalo and black-husked wild rice.
Although there are exceptions, like the Ukrainian establishments spread
across central Manitoba, the bulk of Canada's ethnic restaurants are
confined to the cities. Here, amongst dozens of others, Japanese
restaurants are fashionable and fairly expensive; Italian food is
popular and generally cheap, providing you stick to pizzas and basic
pasta dishes; and there's the occasional Indian restaurant, mostly
catering for the inexpensive end of the market. East European food is a
good, filling standby, especially in central Canada, and cheap Chinese
restaurants are common throughout the country. French food, of course,
is widely available - though, except in Québec, it's nearly always
expensive.
Tipping
Almost everywhere you eat or drink, the service will be fast and
friendly - thanks to the institution of tipping . Waiters and bartenders
depend on tips for the bulk of their earnings and, unless the service is
dreadful, you should top up your bill by fifteen percent or more. A
refusal to tip is considered rude and mean in equal measure. If you're
paying by credit card, there's a space on the payment slip where you can
add the appropriate tip. If you don't know how much to tip, a good bet
is to double the tax.
Drinking
Canadian bars, like their American equivalents, are mostly long and
dimly lit counters with a few customers perched on stools gawping at the
bartender, and the rest of the clientele occupying the surrounding
tables and booths. Yet, despite the similarity of layout, bars vary
enormously, from the male-dominated, rough-edged drinking holes
concentrated in the blue-collar parts of the cities and the resource
towns (dealing in mining and oil) of the north, to more fashionable city
establishments that provide food, live entertainment and an inspiring
range of cocktails. Indeed, it's often impossible to separate
restaurants from bars - drinking and eating are no longer the separate
activities they mostly were up until the 1960s.
The legal drinking age is 18 in Alberta, Manitoba, Québec, Northwest
Territories, Saskatchewan and the Yukon and 19 in the rest of the
country, though it's rare for anyone to have to show ID, except at the
government-run liquor stores (closed Sun), which exercise a virtual
monopoly on the sale of alcoholic beverages of all kinds direct to the
public; the main exception is Québec, where beer and wine are sold at
retail grocery stores.
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