This Coastal Province Is Home to Canada’s Next Great Food Scene

In the tiny town of Cap-Pele, you’ll find more than 20 traditional smokehouses where herring is hung on wooden rods over smoldering open fires. It’s an intense, physical process, says Mario Cormier, who started helping his grandad in the smokehouses when he was just 10 years old. “It could be automated,” says Cormier, the executive director of Cap-Pele Herring Export, “but there’s a great deal of pride in creating our niche product the way that we do. It’s in our blood.”

Be it enjoying the white sands and fresh lobster of Shediac (after posing with the world’s largest lobster in the self-proclaimed lobster capital of the world), having a salty snack of herring with a local microbrew, or biting into a distinctive local cinnamon pastry, New Brunswick and its Acadian flavors may be Canada’s next great food scene.

Descendants of early 1600s French settlers who were expelled by the British in 1755 – the Acadian diaspora includes Louisiana’s Cajuns, as well as settlers in France and the Caribbean. But many Acadians returned to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia after the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, toting with them a pioneering spirit and French technique. Traditional dishes like fricot, a chicken-and-dumpling soup, and poutine râpée, boiled potato dumplings stuffed with seasoned pork, are so rib-sticking and homey that it can be challenging to find these Indigenous recipes in local restaurants.

But a new breed of Acadian chefs, including Benjamin Cormier, chef and owner of Origines Cuisine Maritime in Caraquet, is dishing out the best local seafood with contemporary variations: Cormier cooks oysters with lobster in a luscious coconut curry, though his French classic Coquille St-Jacques, made with Bay of Fundy scallops, is the menu’s all-star appetizer. At Moncton’s Les Brumes du Coude, chef and owner Michel Savoie nods to nostalgia with his molasses-baked Acadian navy beans but then serves them on housemade sourdough toast with a drizzle of olive oil. His local lobster finds its way into a delicate tart, while fresh scallops make for a spicy ceviche.

In Fredericton, the focus at Claudine’s Eatery may be on the jumbo lobster rolls and lobster grilled cheeses, but come Christmastime, co-owner Claudine Cyr makes 200 tourtière or pâté à la viande (meat pies) by hand, mixing up the beef, pork, and turkey with seasonings like summer savory and a little clove, just like her Acadian mother and grandmother used to make. She says the best part of making the pies with her mother was the bonus cookies they’d make afterward, using leftover pastry.

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“We’d roll out the dough, spread it with butter and brown sugar, roll it up like a cinnamon roll, and slice it up for the cookies,” says Cyr. They’re called pet de soeurs. “That's ‘nun's farts’ in English,” she adds. The sweet treat can be found in Acadian bakeries across the province, and Halo Donuts in Moncton even features a seasonal nun’s fart flavor.

While Acadia may not be an actual place on a map anymore, New Brunswick’s Acadians have found a home here, one of ocean and land, of rich traditions and culinary ambition. To some that means a perfect summertime lobster plate at the (seasonally open) Captain Dan’s Bar & Grill along the picturesque Pointe du Chene Wharf in Shediac, or a few blocks down from the beach, a warming dish of fricot hit with a ton of summer savory, served at Bistro le Moque-Tortue.

Either way, you’ll leave New Brunswick with a belly full of local seafood, a new taste for Acadian cooking, and the delight in knowing you’ve discovered a new food destination that’s on the cusp of becoming even bigger than the world’s largest lobster.

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