Prince Edward Island (PEI) is famous throughout Canada for its produce: potatoes, beef, dairy, lobsters, scallops, mussels, and more. While those are delicious, it’s strange that the Islanders haven’t created specialty dishes with them. One exception is fries with the works.
Prince Edward Island Convention Centre
It’s feasible to try all the restaurants in Charlottetown that offer this dish if you have the time, appetite, and companions to share the calories with. For those that don’t, here’s a quick rundown of the top contenders.
Edmonton has exactly one food speciality: their take on donairs. Since this is Alberta, the land of cattle, it’s also a good opportunity to try the local beef and game meats.
Victoria is a picturesque capital at the tip of Vancouver Island. What it doesn’t have is a specialty dish. There are several fish and chips restaurants. Lacking the appetite to try all of them, I opted for chowder instead. Good news is that they come in tiny cup sizes. With all the different variations, chowders might become the Victorian specialty.
Where to get the best Nanaimo bars in their place of origin
Nanaimo is a seaside town that’s used mainly as a transit point to catch a ferry. However, it has an outsized claim to fame on the Canadian culinary landscape–Nanaimo bars. They are widely found across Canada, though more common in the Western provinces. No one is sure who created this dessert but it emerged from Nanaimo in the 1950s. And yes, locals call them Nanaimo bars too, even in Nanaimo.
Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories do not have unique food creations. At best, they offer an opportunity to try the local produce. Yellowknife is blessed with the second-largest lake in Canada and fishing tourism is booming here. Naturally, local fishes are the thing to try.
Whitehorse doesn’t have unique food specialties. In fact, neither does anywhere in the Yukon. Early gold rush settlers brought sourdough bread from San Francisco, which in turn came from Europe. Although there’s a sourdough winter festival in Whitehorse, the “sourdough” here refers to hardy locals rather than the bread.
Jenni House at Whitehorse
While sourdough (the bread) isn’t a big thing in Whitehorse, it’s a fine place to try local game meats.
Cinnamon buns can be found all over Scandinavia but no country does it better than Sweden. Denmark, Iceland, and Norway make a simple and boring roll. Finland’s version, korvapuusti, is a runner-up with its interesting angled cuts. In Sweden, the bun is intricately knotted, resulting in the most aesthetically-pleasing variant.
Sergels torg, Stockholm
Kanelbullar: the zenith of cinnamon buns
The Swedish cinnamon bun is called kanelbulle (singular) or kanelbullar (plural). It uses the same cardamom-tinged dough as other Nordic countries. The main difference is in its shape. At the better bakeries, the dough is braided and knotted. It results in a more airy bake. Also unique to Sweden, the kanelbullar are finished off with a sprinkling of crunchy white pearl sugar.
Sweden has a social ritual called fika. It’s essentially a coffee break with snacks. Kanelbullar is a popular option to accompany fika. If you consume them fast enough, you get cinammon and cardamon flavoured coffee, kind of like Indian chai.
As expected, the highest concentration of bakeries is in Stockholm. So, I set off on a quest to find the best kanelbullar in the city.
Mélange of Indian, Creole, and French on a granite paradise
La Digue, Seychelles
People visit Seychelles for the breathtaking beaches. The food isn’t as amazing. It’s either generic food, like pizzas and fried chicken, or homegrown Creole food. No prizes for guessing which one is worth eating.
Seychellois Creole food is island food with Indian influences and a touch of French. In Africa, Creole refers to any person of mixed ancestry from Africa and colonial Europe. Americans may associate Creole with Louisiana, but it’s really spread out from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean.
The best place to get local food is on Mahé island because that’s where most of the population is. Unfortunately, it’s not where most tourists linger. They head to Praslin and La Digue, with more gorgeous landscapes and luxurious accommodations. So, this guide will cover those islands as well.
Havana is not the first place one would think of for good food. Still, it’s the best culinary destination in the whole of Cuba and the best opportunity to sample traditional cooking. Spoilers: it’s mostly pork, beans, plantains, and yucca.
Standards are comparable to mid-range restaurants in Western Europe…provided one sticks to the tourist restaurants and eschews resort food. Normally, I avoid tourist restaurants but I haven’t come across a locally-oriented restaurant in Havana that’s worth recommending. Choice ingredients and skillful technique are unfortunately priced out of range for the vast majority of Cubans.
Havana. Modern, brutalist, and art deco mingle.
I assume that you’re not planning to go to Cuba to eat French, Italian, Spanish, or American food, so I’ve focused on the unique Havana experiences in this article.
The vicissitudes of eating out in Cuba
Havana’s culinary scene has gone through ups and downs. It was mostly forgotten by the world after the Cuban revolution in 1959. Restaurants became state-run. It became a challenge to find somewhere that would accept foreigners, let alone with good food.
When Cuba opened up for tourism in the 1990s during the “special period” (período especial; tough economic times), the government allowed private enterprise in the form of paladares: family-run restaurants out of their own homes. That marked the renaissance of Cuban dining. Today, the range, quality, and ambience of paladares exceeds that of government-run food establishments. They are indistinguishable from regular restaurants elsewhere in the world, other than the discreet home residence beyond the kitchen.
The second challenge to deal with is the availability of ingredients. Especially imported ones that upscale restaurants advertise like olive oil and squid ink. The US trade embargo has made it difficult to secure a consistent and affordable supply chain. Tourists complain of how often most items on the menu are not available. I say Cuban chefs have to improvise like nowhere else in the world in the face of unstable supply issues. They have to be creative about substitutions and figuring out how to maximize the ingredients they have on hand.
A more recent challenge affects tourists as much as Cubans: currency. Since 2021, Cuba’s inflation rate has run amok at 70%. Before 2021, Cuba had two currencies: peso (CUP) and convertible peso (CUC). 1 CUC is exactly 1 US dollar and it was what (most) tourists used and restaurant menus were priced with. Now, there is just CUP, whose value continues to plummet against global currencies each day. Virtually all prices are quoted in CUP now and tourists have to use them for everyday purchases (with some exceptions). Until the currency stabilizes, you’re better off exchanging for pesos in the black market than at the bank or ATM. Otherwise, you’ll be wondering why you just paid 8.00 € for a slice of mediocre pizza. The street rate is two to three times better than the official one.
Where to eat Newfoundland specialties in St John’s
Newfoundland is like a different country. The people there have a distinct accent and their own dictionary. Place names seem to be made up by pirates. The level of development is 10 years behind the urbanized provinces of Canada. And the food appears to have branched off from Britain and Ireland in the 1800s and developed into its own, much like Quebec did with French cuisine in the 1700s.
St John’s
Here’s where to try the mildly intriguing foods of Newfoundland in St John’s.
Fries with dressing
Ches’s Famous Fish and Chips
No, not salad dressing. Newfoundland dressing is what the rest of Canada calls turkey stuffing. It’s a mealy mix of bread crumbs and summer savoury, the key ingredient. Summer savoury is a herb that was somewhat popular in British cooking but fell out of favour in the rest of Canada. Here, it lives on through dressing.
Dressing is usually found with fries and doused with gravy, leading some to call it “Newfoundland poutine”. Pubs and greasy diners serve them. For fish and chips with dressing, local institution Ches’s is a good introduction.
Ches’s Famous Fish and Chips
Ches’s isn’t the best fish and chips in St John’s (some say it’s The Duke of Duckworth) but it’s one of the oldest. My cod bites and chips were traditional British style. Rather bland flour batter and thick-cut chips. The magic is in the gravy and dressing (both sold separately). The dressing was crumbly and one could clearly see and taste the green savoury leaves. The gravy was one-note but combined with the dressing and fries, it was a novel and satisfying experience. It’s like turkey dinner without the turkey. 7/10.
Cod bites and chips with dressing and gravy from Ches’s Famous Fish and Chips
