CANADA'S BEST PLACE TO EAT

THE COUNTRY'S 20 MOST MAGICAL RESTAURANTS, FROM THE TIP OF VANCOUVER ISLAND TO THE EDGE OF NEWFOUNDLAND

- CHRIS NUTTALL-SMITH

It's funny what happens when you can't eat in restaurants for a couple of years.

The stop-start reopening of 2022 took all of a heartbeat to become what I can only think of today as the great Canadian dining frenzy-a record-smashing rush of packed rooms and ravenous patrons unleashing our pent-up appetites.

As the dining business began to settle early this year into a new post-pandemic normal, I set out on an epic, 50-restaurant, coast-to-coast eating jag for Maclean's, gorging my way from Quidi Vidi, Newfoundland, to Ucluelet, B.C. The intention: to take the temperature of the country's remade dining landscape-and to uncover Canada's most spectacular restaurants along the way.

At their best, the kitchens and dining rooms I visited ran at a consistently higher level than I've ever seen, offering sensational, can't-do-this-at-home cooking and warm, joyful service. You could tell how happy (and relieved) the staff and owners were to be back. Yet the industry we've returned to isn't the same as before. For many welcome new developments, there have been trade-offs too. The most jarring of these has been the price of eating out.

It might have been the $48-per-dozen local (and completely average) oysters in St. John's that got me. Not just at one spot, but at almost every bar and restaurant where I could find them. Or the simple weeknight pasta dinner in Toronto with my wife and kid; with just a couple glasses of wine, it came to $170 after tax and tip. The price of a cocktail has edged toward $20 in a lot of restaurants. I saw no end of main courses for $40 and up in what used to be known, I guess quaintly, as "mid-range" spots.

That mid-range, suddenly more expensive almost across the board, has taken a hit in pricier centres, Toronto in particular.