Canada's Best New Restaurants, 2019 Edition
For the second year in a row, I went under cover for Air Canada’s enRoute magazine to criss-cross the country and select its top 10 new restaurants of the year. The package, known internally as CBNR, or Canada’s Best New Restaurants, appears every year in the November issue. Anticipation begins building in August, when my long list of contenders is released. Up until this year, that long list consisted of 30 restaurants. This year, there were so many strong contenders we expanded it to 35 restaurants. And, I also got to write this this online travel diary of my experience.
Because my travel is solitary and I keep my identity under wraps I don’t get to hear much feedback from readers. So it was unusually fun to participate in a closed-doors, members-only, no-photos-allowed panel discussion with other members of the CBNR team at Toronto’s Soho House.
Audience members were very interested in how the monumental exercise in logistics, scheduling, eating and drinking that is CBNR comes together every year. There were also questions about how I preserve my anonymity (the photo below is one method), how I survive eating and drinking so much, and what trends I saw emerging on the national dining landscape.
As a joke, we decided I could channel J.T. Leroy and show up in sunglasses and baseball hat. The last thing I grabbed from the closet before leaving my apartment that morning was what I thought was a Toronto Blue Jays hat. Canadians are so polite that no one commented on it until the British Soho House event coordinator Zoe remarked that my head wear might ruffle some feathers in the room. I looked at her, perplexed ,and took the hat off. What I thought was a Blue Jays hat was actually a New York Rangers hat. (The colors are very similar, it was early, not to mention pre-coffee!). My extremely un-Canadian bad. I apologized to the audience. Guilt-mitigating rationalization: at least it wasn’t a Knicks hat, what with Serge Ibaka of the Raptors on the cover of the CBNR issue depicted dining at Seoul Shakers, one of the long list contenders this year.
But seriously, check out the both the long and the short list—you’ll see what a great country Canada is to dine out in these days!
