The best part about a staycation? No pressure to leave the hotel, not that I wanted to leave the Alt Hotel St. John’s anyways: With gorgeous decor and high-tech amenities, the Newfoundland addition to the Le Germain family is welcome.
I arrived in Ottawa on a Saturday and it was -20C with the windchill. When I left on Tuesday it was 7C and raining. No, this wasn’t atypical for Canadian travel. It was March. During those shoulder season months (travel-industry jargon for March-June and September-November) it’s […]
“Who picked this place? It’s so good!” my friend exclaimed as we dug into the table full of French food. How good does it feel when you pick a restaurant in a city where you don’t live that your New Yorker friends haven’t been to yet […]
Vacation = Marathon eating. Here are my favourite 5 bites at the best London restaurants from the first stop on our honeymoon.
Imagine a food festival where you would meander along the coastline sampling dishes from famous chefs and drinking wine. Musicians would play music while you lingered by the ocean with a full belly and happy heart and you finish your afternoon with desserts in a playground. Well, dreams really do come true.
Hop Hop Hurray! The craft beer scene here in Newfoundland is bubbling over. There are literally dozens of breweries set to open the next year and I’m slowly working my way down the list (hard job, but someone’s gotta do it! Labour Day weekend Adam and I drove out to spend the weekend in Dildo to try the Dildo Brewing Co. and Museum which opened just a few months ago. What a difference a year makes! We spent the weekend in Dildo last year while I was covering a story for North American Traveller and while the town was had lots to offer, it’s now bustling with the new brewery, newly-opened Dildo Cove Outdoor Adventures, and a re-branded Dildo Dory Grill. (more…)
Dining at the Fogo Island Inn feels like being at nan’s — an onslaught of pastries the moment you walk in the door until you walk out with a bagged lunch for the trip home. Here’s what’s new on the menu.
I’ve been The Food Girl in Town for two thousand, one hundred and ninety days. Here’s what happened in the 6th year. You’ll never guess how many restaurants I ate in this year… yes, I counted.
I think many people shy away from shellfish because they are nervous about cooking it at home, seeing it as a luxury item, or something relegated to summer boil ups on the coast. But The Great Shellfish Cookbook by Matt Dean Petit puts all those worries to rest by outlining all the things you need to know about cooking shellfish. I was delighted when this cookbook showed up in my mailbox, and even though it’s the end of summer, it’s certainly not the end of shellfish season — in fact oysters don’t have a season, and lobster is harvested year round on the East Coast. Here’s what I thought of it. (more…)
When new restaurants open in St. John’s, I get excited. When said restaurant opens a ten-minute walk from my house I get fired up — I couldn’t wait to blog about Noodle Nami.
When Jumping Bean closed their Harvey Road location earlier this year I was pretty crushed, it was one of the only places I could get a decent coffee in my neighbourhood, but a new restaurant got me over it pretty quickly.
I just knocked a big one off the bucket list. Or should I say a really long one? As part of a journalistic fellowship with the Canada China Business Council I was sauntering along that Great Wall within 12 hours of touching down in Beijing. We chose the Juyongguan section of the wall also known as the Juyong Pass, one of three mountain passes along the 21,000km wall because it’s supposed to be a little less crowded — like all major tourist destinations there are tips and tricks visiting the Great Wall of China.
Screw stopping to smell the roses, I’m all about them ocean views. Witless Bay is only about half an hour’s drive from St. John’s, so it’s easy to get there on a Friday evening, but it feels like it’s a million miles away.
Whether it’s a saltbox house vacation rental, drop-dead gorgeous boutique inn o homey hostel, there’s a plethora of Newfoundland accommodations to snuggle into this summer.
Kraft Dinner has always been there for me. When I was little, my father would add real cheese to boxes of Kraft Dinner in a (probably vain) attempt at making the addictive blue-boxed delight healthier for my sister and me. It spawned the creation of ‘cheese noodles’ where he would mix up butter, milk and cheddar together with macaroni in another attempt at getting us to eat something a little less… processed. We’ve been devouring them regularly, and believe me when I say cheese noodles are not Kraft Dinner nor are they stove top mac n’ cheese. Just ask my girlfriends — after years of doling out drunken bowl-fulls, the girls still message me from all over the world asking me to make it for them.
The Food Girl in Town is about everything I love: cook pasta for my friends, culinary history, and finding fancy hotel rooms for cheap! As a culinary adventurer and freelance writer, I travel to eat. I spend a lot of time researching my next trip — there's always a next trip — and booking hotels near restaurants I want to try.
