dsmWealth correspondent Steve Dinnen enjoyed fresh lobster, along with views of the Souris Lighthouse and Charlottetown harbor on Prince Edward Island. (Photos: Elise Huang and Getty)
By Steve Dinnen
You have several options for seafood dining in Des Moines. Splash, for instance, justly brags about its jet-fresh selection.
But if you want it plucked right off a dock, you can follow in our footsteps for a late summer vacation to Maritime Canada and feast upon no end of fruits de mer.
My friend Elise and I started our journey in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where we picked up a rental car and headed immediately to the next province over, New Brunswick. Our destination was Shediac, home to a huge lobstering fleet and the annual Shediac Lobster Festival. The streets were darned near paved with lobster, at least on the night of the community feast, and we availed ourselves of several of these crustaceans. A restaurant meal ran around $50 Canadian ($36 U.S.), while on our last day we stopped at a market and picked up a pair of 1.5-pound beauties for $15 each ($11 U.S.). We took them back to our motel and ate them on a picnic table.
From there we made a short drive over the bridge to Prince Edward Island. It is here, in dozens of bays filled with cool calm water, that many of the mussels consumed in the United States are grown. Where in Iowa, or anywhere in the Midwest, can you feel that freshness?
The capital of PEI is Charlottetown, where we lucked into student lodging that Holland College rents out to tourists in the summer. We also met up with Julie Chen, who showed us around her charming Sydney Boutique Inn and Suites that she’s fashioned from a 170-year-old convent. The walkable, touristy port near her hotel has no end of seafood eateries, plus charter services for fishing or lobstering boats.
At the north end of the island are several museums and monuments paying homage to Anne of Green Gables, the beloved young heroine of a book series Lucy Maud Montgomery set on the island. We missed the nearby Canadian Potato Museum, though nearly every meal we ate included a basket of fried potatoes, freshly plucked, like the lobsters, from local sources. They were universally delicious.
Lobsters: check. Mussels: check. Scallops: on to Digby. Here, the fishermen chase down scallops in the Bay of Fundy. Again, delicious, and some of the places served them up simply, on hot dog buns. We also added in some “haddie bits,” fried pieces of freshly caught haddock. The annual Digby Scallop Days roll around in early August.
On the eastern shore of Nova Scotia we ate more haddock, ocean-variety scallops, and oysters, oysters and more oysters. Back in Halifax, the port is lined with seafood restaurants, so we could, and did, sample pretty much everything we’d driven around to eat. Oddly, to me, most restaurants outside of Halifax close by 8 p.m., so don’t dawdle.
Good roads, friendly people and great food met us. Pleasant weather, too: Folks apologized one day when it almost reached 90. So go ahead, close your eyes, stick your finger on a map and open them to see where you might wind up before summer’s end.
