Canada

WorldEats Country #1: Canada

Victoria, 2007

For Canada, the first country in our WorldEats challenge, we sampled several different aspects of Canadian cuisine. We went for some Montreal specialties like smoked meat, bagels and poutine at Mile End Sandwich, and we explored the influence of Asian food in Canada (especially Toronto and Vancouver) by ordering up some Japanese hot dogs at Vancouver-import Japadog.

Timbits in Ontario - we now have these in NYC but they are better in Canada, as is the coffee

Canadian cuisine was a bit tougher to explore than we thought it would be. We weren't able to find any sort of "Canadian restaurant" in our research (Tim Horton's does not count for this purpose and we did not go there for WorldEats as we had previously visited TH's on both sides of the border), so we couldn't just "go out for Canadian food." It took a little more work to identify dishes or types of food that we wanted to try and search them out. Since the country is so large and diverse, it's a little like "American cuisine" in that you have to look for specific things (like BBQ, Southern, Tex-Mex, etc). But in the end we're pretty happy with the results. We tried two places that had been on our list to try for some time and the food was really tasty. I'm sure we'll be back to those spots. After all, we've already made repeat visits for the sake of these posts!

I was looking through my pics for Canadian flags, and this one from Victoria has plenty!

As the recaps of our "official" Canadian exploration come to an end, we saw news yesterday that an Ontario burger chain, Big Smoke Burger, is on its way to NYC, bringing with it all sorts of delicious sounding burgers (I'm quite intrigued by the namesake burger as well as the crazy burger) and our favorite poutine. I guess someday it will be easier to find "Canadian cuisine" here in the city. I'm pretty sure we'll be checking it out when they open!