Local (to me) Chefs Attempt to Wake up the Tourism Sector...

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The part of Atlantic Canada where I live is something of a backwater. Although larger than neighbouring NS and Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick is small by the standards of Canadian provinces (roughly 28K square miles for you Americans, a titch smaller than Maine but bigger than Virginia; for Europeans our 72K square km would put us between Serbia and Iceland in size) and decidedly lags those two in promoting itself.

 

Most of the province's tourism budget goes to promoting a handful of sites: a couple of living museums (Acadian Village, showing how the Francophones lived before most of them were deported to Louisiana; and King's Landing, representing the Loyalists who came here after the American Revolution, ie "Colonial Williamsburg...The Sequel") and mostly the high tides and Hopewell Rocks at Fundy National Park ("Walk on the Ocean Floor!").

 

A few local chefs and food writers are staging a symposium next week to host representatives of the tourism industry and drive home the message that food and drink can make a significant contribution to tourism. We do have some really high-quality talent here, and plenty for them to work with. Here's the writeup:

https://huddle.today/nbs-chefs-will-gather-and-tell-the-provinces-food-story-at-tourism-symposium/

 

 

[Darienne]

Not sure what icon to put up for your post.  It's true.  NB is not a known tourist destination really.  For us it's on the way to NS where our son lives...something to get through.  Sorry.  But then I expect that Manitoba, and even more Saskatchewan, feel exactly the same way.  

 

As for tourism to Canada...American friends always tell me how exciting and wonderful their trips to Toronto have been.  I go to Toronto only when forced at knife-point, and not a small knife, a big knife like the one Crocodile Dundee pulls out in NY.

Edited November 1, 2019 by Darienne (log)

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1 minute ago, Darienne said:

Not sure what icon to put up for your post.  It's true.  NB is not a known tourist destination really.  For us it's on the way to NS where our son lives...something to get through.  Sorry.  But then I expect that Manitoba, and even more Saskatchewan feel exactly the same way.  

 

As for tourism to Canada...American friends always tell me how exciting and wonderful their trips to Toronto have been.  I go to Toronto only when forced at knife-point, and not a small knife, a big knife like the one Crocodile Dundee pulls out in NY.

 

Even worse, they shoot themselves in the collective foot constantly.

A few years ago they opened up a big new highway crossing point outside of St. Stephen/Calais, where the old crossings were. It's great...lots of lanes, and right away you're onto a broad, multi-lane highway that can take you straight through to NS or north to Quebec.

Unfortunately, it also means that most tourists simply race past the entire southwestern corner of the province. That's where most of the Fundy coast is, with its fishing villages, the historic resort town of St. Andrews-by-the-Sea and some really prime food and drink. Of course, people could just pull into the nearest tourism information center to find out about all of those things, right?

Wanna guess where the nearest one is? Well, technically it's in St. Stephen itself, but having bypassed the town and gone through the new crossing you wouldn't know that. Instead, most drivers zip 90 minutes up the road to Saint John before seeing a tourism center.* The Chamber of Commerce in the affected corner of NB even offered to foot the bill for constructing one near the border crossing, but the province refused. SMH...

(*Which promotes a couple of local attractions, but mostly attempts to funnel people onwards to Fundy Park and Hopewell Rocks. Because that's how they've always done it.)

[kayb]

Restaurants and food destinations can certainly become tourism generators; see New Orleans or the Napa Valley for a classic example. Asheville, NC, is on its way in that direction, But on a smaller scale, many small towns have restaurants that serve as regional tourist destinations. I can think of a couple of restaurants in my area which have traditionally served as destinations for diners from Memphis, Jonesboro, and other spots an hour or two-hour drive away. Ditto other food-related attractions; I have driven an hour or two to buy farm-raised meat, or vegetables, or to pick apples or berries, or to buy bread.

 

I think the emphasis on locally-raised, or rather regionally-raised, small farm and kitchen produced artisan (to use a horribly overworked term) food will become a growing economic driver in the next 20 years.

 

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18 minutes ago, kayb said:

Restaurants and food destinations can certainly become tourism generators; see New Orleans or the Napa Valley for a classic example. Asheville, NC, is on its way in that direction, But on a smaller scale, many small towns have restaurants that serve as regional tourist destinations. I can think of a couple of restaurants in my area which have traditionally served as destinations for diners from Memphis, Jonesboro, and other spots an hour or two-hour drive away. Ditto other food-related attractions; I have driven an hour or two to buy farm-raised meat, or vegetables, or to pick apples or berries, or to buy bread.

 

I think the emphasis on locally-raised, or rather regionally-raised, small farm and kitchen produced artisan (to use a horribly overworked term) food will become a growing economic driver in the next 20 years.

 

 

It's been difficult here over the past decade. My former lamb supplier gave up and went back to her day job. Of the four artisan raw-cheese makers I used to buy from when my restaurant was open, two have folded and one sold out to a new owner. My boar supplier sold off his last livestock this past summer and converted his space into a wedding venue. An ambitious young family with a natural foods store in Fredericton went broke trying to establish a network to connect local growers and vendors with chefs and consumers.

 

It's frustrating to see it happening all around us, and yet have it be such a struggle here.

 

On the upside, the local craft beer and craft distilling scenes are booming and the local wine industry has gotten through its infancy. No startlingly good wines yet (it's a couple of decades behind NS), but many serviceable ones.