Tag: New Restaurants

Where to Savour Canada’s Indigenous Culinary Scene

30 September 2025

Canada’s Indigenous culinary scene is blossoming, rooted in tradition yet boldly innovating with cafés, restaurants, breweries and farms that honour both the land and culture. Here’s a look at some of the newest openings and product launches across the country. 

Featured: Nk’Mip Cellars. Imagery and list courtesy of the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada (ITAC).

Bernadette's

Cafés & Restaurants

Ancestor Café by Tradish (Fort Langley, BC)
Tradish tells stories of culture, sustainability and respect for the land through its food. At Ancestor Café, guests can enjoy bannock tacos filled with bison or elk, sweet bannock bites, artisanal jams and herbal lemonades — a menu where tradition, wellness and storytelling meet.

Salmon n’ Bannock Bistro – New Bannock Mix (Vancouver, BC)
A Vancouver institution, Salmon n’ Bannock brings modern Indigenous flavours to the table. Now, travellers can take a piece of it home with a signature bannock mix, soon available at YVR duty-free shops.

Bernadette’s (Edmonton, AB)
Opened in 2025, Bernadette’s is raising Indigenous cuisine to fine-dining heights. Founded by Chef Scott Iserhoff and Svitlana Kravchuk, the restaurant is named after Iserhoff’s grandmother and serves dishes like raw bison, Saskatoon-berry brisket on bannock, and rabbit ragu with potato dumplings.

Kahnawake Brewing Co.
Nk’Mip Cellars

Wineries & Breweries

Locality Brewing (Langley, BC)
This Métis-owned farm brewery grows and malts every ingredient on site — from barley and hops to berries and honey — crafting truly farm-to-glass beers that taste of the land they come from.

Nk’Mip Cellars (Osoyoos, BC)
North America’s first Indigenous-owned winery, Nk’Mip Cellars offers wine flights, reserve tastings and food pairings like the Four Food Chiefs experience, set against sweeping South Okanagan vineyard views.

Kahnawake Brewing Co. (Kahnawake, QC)
Canada’s first Indigenous-owned microbrewery pays homage to Mohawk ironworker heritage while producing creative, small-batch beers that have built a loyal following both locally and beyond.

Kekuli Café
Tea Horse

Coffee & Tea

Kekuli Café (Kamloops, BC)
With the motto “Don’t panic, we have bannock!”, this café puts a fun spin on Indigenous staples, serving tipi tacos, harvest bowls and baked bannock treats. New locations are expanding its reach across Canada, including soon in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Tea Horse (Thunder Bay, ON)
Founded by Denise Atkinson, Anishinaabe ikwe, Tea Horse blends Indigenous traditions with global tea culture. Its wild-rice teas and custom blends make for a uniquely Northern Ontario sip.

Moccasin Joe Coffee Roasters (Kanehsatake, QC)
Family-owned and award-winning, Moccasin Joe focuses on ethical, small-batch roasting that puts sustainability and flavour at the forefront.

Unique Food & Farm Experiences

Pollen Nation Farm (Little Rapids, NL)
An Indigenous-owned farm and beekeeping project, Pollen Nation offers bee tours, foraging walks and fireside meals showcasing raw honey and land-based food traditions at its rustic “Beestro.”

Upper Humber Settlement (Cormack, NL)
On a historic veteran farming site, this Indigenous-owned B&B and farm-stay offers guests the chance to forage, dine farm-to-table, and hear stories around the fire, blending cultural history with regenerative farming.

To discover more Indigenous food and beverage businesses across the country, visit IndigenousCuisine.ca.

Bon Appétit Just Released Its List of the Best New Restaurants in the US for 2025

15 September 2025

Every September, food media rolls out its picks for the year’s most exciting places to eat — and Bon Appétit has just dropped its 2025 Best New Restaurants list. While it’s not the only voice in the conversation, the roundup offers a useful snapshot of how dining in America is evolving. This year’s collection of 20 restaurants leans heavily into storytelling: chefs using their menus to explore identity, migration, and memory.

Instead of headline-grabbing gimmicks, the restaurants Bon Appétit highlights are rooted in personal history and a sense of place. In San Francisco, Fernay McPherson’s Minnie Bell’s Soul Movement feels like a homecoming, with soulful plates that link her family’s past to the present-day Fillmore district. In Seattle, Lenox channels chef Jhonny Reyes’s Puerto Rican roots into dishes that also celebrate the bounty of the Pacific Northwest. His crackling lechon with farm-fresh mustard greens bridges San Juan, New York, and Seattle in a single dish.

Lenox in Seattle

The list also celebrates bold expressions of cultural fusion. In Atlanta, Avize looks like a traditional Alpine restaurant until a plate of frog legs dusted with Atlanta’s own lemon-pepper seasoning lands at the table. The dish captures the dual identity of chef Jason Paolini’s project: European at first glance, Southern at its core. Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, Dōgon marks the triumphant return of star chef Kwame Onwuachi, who pays homage to the city’s Ethiopian and Trinidadian communities with Wagyu short ribs in smoky awaze sauce and fried lamb surrounded by curried chickpeas.

Not every entry is high-profile. In Pittsburgh, Fet-Fisk has transformed a Little Italy bar into a Nordic-leaning hotspot where diners sip marigold schnapps alongside pickled mackerel. In New York, Ha’s Snack Bar (pictured above) has become the city’s buzziest reservation, serving Vietnamese-French small plates from a chalkboard menu that changes nightly — a place so coveted that reservations vanish as soon as they’re posted.

What unites these 20 restaurants isn’t cuisine or geography, but intimacy. Bon Appétit’s editors describe them as meals you won’t experience anywhere else, each one shaped by the specific journey of the chef who created it. In a year where dining out has to be more than just dinner, this list proves that the most exciting restaurants in America are memoirs you can eat.