I was in Canada awhile back, which is a little like saying that I was in Kansas, except it was colder and wetter. Now, don't get me wrong, I really like Canada. It's a very nice country to have to the north. It just doesn't seem to be all that different from us. They speak pretty good English up there, except that some of them speak French. They have lots of good musicians, as long as you like Celine Dion and Nickelback. They're a major source of comedians, though some of them -- like Dan Aykroyd -- tend to go into high coast after a few good movies.

            But what they don't have, as far as I can tell, is a cuisine. They eat, but they don't eat Canadian food. Or at least they don't eat anything readily identifiable as Canadian food. Unless you consider what Bob & Doug McKenzie ate back in the day as being Canadian cuisine, which is to say cans of beer and back bacon. I'm not sure that beer and bacon really qualifies as a cuisine. Except maybe in Canada, for lack of anything else.

           On the eastern side of Canada, there's a cuisine, which is pretty easy to identify. That's because it's French, though French with variations. There's something akin to a French-Canadian cuisine, which includes dishes like a ground pork, beef, onion, breadcrumb and garlic pie called tourtiere, along with an assortment of variations on a theme like creton Francais (more or less pate de foie gras), beignets and coquignoles (basically doughnuts), and ragout de pattes et boules (sort of a stew of pigs' feet and meatballs).

            Up in the Maritimes, they eat a lot of seafood, like Arctic char, and Buctouche oysters. They also like to boil fiddlehead ferns and eat dulse. I figure they also drink a lot of beer and eat back bacon too. In Newfoundland, you'll probably find yourself being offered a nice plate of brews, which is cod cooked in milk with broken biscuits. Flipper pie is made from seal: I kid you not. In the middle of the country, they eat buffalo, bear and groundhog, and harvest some very good wild rice. They consume a lot of maple syrup too. If you could live on maple syrup, that would qualify quite nicely as a cuisine.

            But walking the streets of Vancouver, the Canadian cognate of San Francisco, Canadian cuisine was not something which I had much luck finding. I found a restaurant which claimed to serve "Canadian-Japanese cooking," but all it really turned out to be was a greasy spoon that offered both bad teriyaki and worse pork chops. I found a restaurant in Chinatown that served "Canadian-Chinese" food, but that seemed to translate into white bread or white rice, chop suey, chow mein and moo goo gai pan. And then, I came upon a semi-legendary seafood eatery in Vancouver's Skid Row called The Only Fish and Oyster Cafe. And I finally got a glimpse of what Canadian food might really be about. 

            The Only has been serving steamed kippered herring and fried ling cod since 1912. It makes a super version of fish 'n chips using halibut, and their oyster pepper stew can't be beat -- you've never seen bigger oysters, or more of them, in one pot. The joint is mostly a counter, with just a few scruffy tables. It's dirt cheap, perfectly wonderful, the sort of place where real Vancouverians go to eat. One of those Vancouverians was sitting next to me. He had a cup of coffee in front of him. He took two pats of butter, and dropped them into the coffee, then stirred them until they dissolved. Add that, I thought, to beer and back bacon, to flipper pie and brew, to fiddlehead ferns and dulse, and I think we've got us a cuisine. And a good explanation for the great and growing popularity of McDonald's north of the border.

--Merrill Shindler