World Travel Guide Search for a City   Destination Guides > North America > Canada Canada •  Canada   · Where To Go •  When To Go •  Getting There •  Red Tape And Visas •  Information, Web Sites And Maps •  Travellers With Disabilities •  Insurance, Crime And Personal Safety •  Costs, Money And Banks •  Health •  Getting Around •  Eating And Drinking •  Communications, Post, Phones, And The Media •  History •  Language •  Emergency Number •  Opening Hours, Time Zones And Holidays •  Nature •  Spectator Sports •  Directory •  Canada's Aboriginal Peoples •  Books •  Explore Canada CANADA - EATING AND DRINKING Canada    view all cities Top Destinations •  Calgary •  Edmonton •  Halifax •  Montreal •  Ottawa •  Quebec City •  St John's •  Toronto •  Vancouver •  Victoria •  Winnipeg Canada's sheer number of restaurants, bars, cafés and fast-food joints is staggering, but at first sight there's little to distinguish Canada's mainstream urban cuisine from that of any American metropolis: the shopping malls, main streets and highways are lined with pan-American food chains, trying to outdo each other with their bargains and special offers. However, it's easy to leave the chain restaurants behind for more interesting options - increasingly so, as the general standard of Canadian cooking has improved dramatically in the last few years. In the big cities there's a plethora of ethnic and speciality restaurants, on either seaboard the availability of fresh fish and shellfish enlivens many menus, and even out in the country - once the domain of unappetizing diners - there's a liberal supply of first-rate, family-run cafés and restaurants, especially in the more touristy areas. Non-smokers may also be relieved to know that almost every café and restaurant has a nonsmoking area and increasing numbers don't allow smoking at all. Breakfast Breakfast is taken very seriously all over Canada, and with prices averaging between $5 and $12 it's often the best-value and most filling meal of the day. Whether you go to a café, coffee shop or hotel snack bar, the breakfast menu, on offer until around 11am, is a fairly standard fry-up - eggs in various guises, ham or bacon, streaky and fried to a crisp, or skinless and bland sausages (except for Nova Scotia's famous Lunenburg sausage, a hot spicy version pioneered by settlers from Europe). Whatever you order, you nearly always receive a dollop of fried potatoes (called hash browns or sometimes home fries). Other favourite breakfast options include English muffins or, in posher places, bran muffins, a glutinous fruitcake made with bran and sugar, and waffles or pancakes , swamped in butter with lashings of maple syrup. Also, because the breakfast/lunch division is never hard and fast, mountainous meaty sandwiches are common too. Whatever you eat, you can wash it down with as much coffee as you can stomach: for the price of the first cup, the waiters/waitresses will - in most places - keep providing free refills until you beg them to stop. The coffee is either regular or decaf and is nearly always freshly ground and very tasty, though lots of the cheaper places dilute it until it tastes like dishwater. In the big cities, look out also for specialist coffee shops, where the range of offerings verges on the bewildering. As a matter of course, coffee comes with cream or half-and-half (half-cream, half-milk) - if you ask for skimmed milk, you're often met with looks of disbelief. Tea , with either lemon or milk, is also drunk at breakfast, and the swisher places emphasize the English connection by using imported brands - or at least brands that sound English. Lunch and snacks Between 11.30am and 2.30pm many big-city restaurants offer special set menus that are generally excellent value. In Chinese and Vietnamese establishments, for example, you'll frequently find rice and noodles, or dim sum feasts for $7 to $10, and many Japanese restaurants give you a chance to eat sushi very reasonably for under $15. Pizza is also widely available, from larger chains like Pizza Hut to family-owned restaurants and pavement stalls. Favourites with white-collar workers are café-restaurants featuring wholefoods and vegetarian fare, though few are nutritionally dogmatic, serving traditional meat dishes and sandwiches too; most have an excellent selection of daily lunch specials for around $9. For quick snacks , many delis do ready-cooked food, including a staggering range of sandwiches and filled bagels. Alternatively, shopping malls sometimes have ethnic fast-food stalls , a healthier option (just about) than the inevitable burger chains, whose homogenized products have colonized every main street in the land. Regional snacks include fish and chips , especially in Newfoundland; Québec's traditional thick, yellow pea soup, smoked meat sandwiches and poutine , fries covered in melted mozzarella cheese or cheese curds and gravy; and the Maritimes' ubiquitous clam chowder , a creamy shellfish and potato soup. Some city bars are used as much by diners as drinkers, who turn up in droves to gorge themselves on the free hors d'oeuvres laid out between 5pm and 7pm from Monday to Friday in an attempt to grab commuters. For the price of a drink you can stuff yourself with pasta and chilli. Brunch is another deal worth looking out for; a cross between breakfast and lunch served up in bars at the weekend from around 11am to 2pm. For a set price ($10 and up) you get a light meal and a variety of complimentary cocktails or wine. Main meals Largely swamped by the more fashionable regional-European and ethnic cuisines, traditional Canadian cooking relies mainly on local game and fish, with less emphasis on vegetables and salads. In terms of price, meals for two without wine average between $25 and $50. Newfoundland 's staple food is the cod, usually in the form of fish and chips, supplemented by salmon, halibut and hake and more bizarre dishes like cod tongues and cheeks, scruncheons (fried cubes of pork fat), smoked or pickled caplin and seal flipper pie. The island's restaurants are not usually permitted to sell moose or seal meat, but many islanders join in the annual licensed shoot and, if you befriend a hunter, you may end up across the table from a hunk of either animal. In the Maritimes , lobster is popular everywhere, whether it's boiled or broiled, chopped up or whole, as are oysters, clams, scallops and herrings either on their own or in a fish stew or clam chowder. Nova Scotia is famous for its blueberries, Solomon Gundy (marinated herring), Annapolis Valley apple pie, fat archies (a Cape Breton molasses cookie) and rappie pie (an Acadian dish of meat or fish and potatoes). New Brunswick is known for its fiddleheads (fern shoots) and dulse (edible seaweed). Fish are Ontario 's most distinctive offering - though the pollution of the Great Lakes has badly affected the freshwater catch. Try the whitefish, lake trout, pike and smelt, but bear in mind that these are easier to come by in the north of the province than in the south. Pork forms a major part of the Québec diet, both as a spicy pork pâté known as creton, and in tourtière, a minced pork pie. There are also splendid thick pea and cabbage soups, beef pies (cipâte), and all sorts of ways to soak up maple syrup - trempette is bread drenched with it and topped with fresh cream. And, of course, Québec is renowned for its outstanding French-style food. Northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba are the places to try fish like the goldeye, pickerel and Arctic char, as well as pemmican (a mixture of dried meat, berries and fat) and fruit pies containing the Saskatoon berry. The Arctic regions feature caribou steak, and Alberta is also noted for its beef steaks. Finally, British Columbia cuisine features Pacific fish and shellfish of many different types, from cod, haddock and salmon to king crab, oysters and shrimp. Here and there, there's also the odd native people's restaurant, most conspicuously at the Wanuskewin Heritage Park in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the restaurant serves venison, buffalo and black-husked wild rice. Although there are exceptions, like the Ukrainian establishments spread across central Manitoba, the bulk of Canada's ethnic restaurants are confined to the cities. Here, amongst dozens of others, Japanese restaurants are fashionable and fairly expensive; Italian food is popular and generally cheap, providing you stick to pizzas and basic pasta dishes; and there's the occasional Indian restaurant, mostly catering for the inexpensive end of the market. East European food is a good, filling standby, especially in central Canada, and cheap Chinese restaurants are common throughout the country. French food, of course, is widely available - though, except in Quebec, it's nearly always expensive. Tipping Almost everywhere you eat or drink, the service will be fast and friendly - thanks to the institution of tipping . Waiters and bartenders depend on tips for the bulk of their earnings and, unless the service is dreadful, you should top up your bill by fifteen percent or more. A refusal to tip is considered rude and mean in equal measure. If you're paying by credit card, there's a space on the payment slip where you can add the appropriate tip. If you don't know how much to tip, a good bet is to double the tax. Drinking Canadian bars, like their American equivalents, are mostly long and dimly lit counters with a few customers perched on stools gawping at the bartender, and the rest of the clientele occupying the surrounding tables and booths. Yet, despite the similarity of layout, bars vary enormously, from the male-dominated, rough-edged drinking holes concentrated in the blue-collar parts of the cities and the resource towns (dealing in mining and oil) of the north, to more fashionable city establishments that provide food, live entertainment and an inspiring range of cocktails. Indeed, it's often impossible to separate restaurants from bars - drinking and eating are no longer the separate activities they mostly were up until the 1960s. The legal drinking age is 18 in Alberta, Manitoba, Québec, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan and the Yukon and 19 in the rest of the country, though it's rare for anyone to have to show ID, except at the government-run liquor stores (closed Sun), which exercise a virtual monopoly on the sale of alcoholic beverages of all kinds direct to the public; the main exception is Québec, where beer and wine are sold at retail grocery stores.