Bain There, Done That: Stuffing Myself With Newfoundland’s Storied Food
By Jennifer Bain | Published June 15, 2026
Bain There, Done That is Jennifer Bain’s bi-weekly column about travelling Canada in search of quirk.
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St. John’s Walking Tours guide Tyra Dawe shows off fries, dressing, gravy and cod at the Duke of Duckworth during a Newfoundland Food Tour/Jennifer Bain
The food tour instructions — to arrive gut-foundered and expect to leave stogged — come with helpful video links to translate Newfoundland English into English.
But our guide still wants to share her own definitions when we meet on a dreary spring afternoon in St. John’s.
“Me sitting here running my mouth forever while you’re all cold and wet and damp and miserable, you will know that I like to spin yarns, or to yarn, which means to talk a lot,” says Tyra Dawe. “I’m going to spin you so many yarns on this tour you’re going to have a sweater by the time I’m done with ya. Thank you for the pity laugh.”
St. John’s Walking Tours guide Tyra Dawe, left, leads a group down George Street in the rain during a food tour in May/Jennifer Bain
Gut-foundered, she explains, means to be very hungry, starved or starved to death. The antidote is a scoff, also known as a feed or a really big meal.
If Dawe does her job right, we’ll soon be block solid, chinched, stogged or— as her mom says — “good for nothing and fit for the bed, which is you ate a lot and you need to go to sleep.”
And so begins my three-hour Newfoundland Food Tour with St. John’s Walking Tours. There will be six stops and we can request to go boxes. “Leftovers — we call them `couldn’ts’ cause you couldn’t eat them the first time,” confides Dawe.
My moose slider at the Celtic Hearth in downtown St. John’s is made from wild moose sold to the restaurant by hunters/Jennifer Bain
The word “couldn’t” isn’t in my culinary vocabulary so I inhale a moose slider at the Celtic Hearth — a 24/7 eatery — while Dawe tells the eight other guests how this is the only province that lets hunters sell wild moose to restaurants.
Dawe calls moose the “best and worst mistake” Newfoundland and Labrador ever made. Four were imported from New Brunswick in 1904 to create a sustainable food source. It worked and now there are some 125,000 moose running around the island in a province of just 550,000.
Anyway, moose are always on my mind here because they dart across roads and make it too dangerous to drive between dusk and dawn.
Mary Brown’s Chicken stars in Kyle Bustin’s three-storey mural in downtown St. John’s, but look for the mer-moose, too/Jennifer Bain
I have a cottage here on Fogo Island and so while I know a few things — like the fact that St. John’s is “town” and the people who live here are “townies,” while everyone else is a “bayman” from “around the bay” — there’s so much more to learn.
Like the fact that artist Kyle Bustin’s playful, three-storey mural at Water and Adelaide Streets features mer-moose and chickens in a submarine because it was commissioned by the home-grown Mary Brown’s fried chicken chain.
The fast-food shop closed, but the mural lives on and we console ourselves with deeply delicious and delightfully enormous raspberry flakies at Rocket Bakery.
Raspberry flakies from Rocket Bakery are stuffed with jam and are a thing of beauty/Jennifer Bain
Not much grows here on the Rock but people love foraging, especially for blueberries, partridgeberries (lingonberries to IKEA shoppers) and bakeapples (cloudberries).
These flakies — puff pastry stuffed with cream and raspberry jam — were inspired by the ones made in Quebec by Vachon.
“We have beaten Quebec at their own game,” Dawe boasts. “We are the number one consumers of flakies in all of Canada.”
Eateries like Rocket Bakery usually reserve spots for St. John’s Walking Tours and its Newfoundland Food Tour, and have the food ready to go/Jennifer Bain
Quoting Great Big Sea musician Alan Doyle, our loquacious guide admits that she never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. So when she enthuses about how George Street holds a Guinness World Record for having the most bars per square footage, I don’t correct her.
George Street in the heart of downtown does have 25 or so bars on two packed blocks. And Statistics Canada has said St. John’s has the highest concentration of bars per capita of major Canadian cities. But there is no world record.
Bridie Molloy’s serves our food tour toutons (fried or baked dough) and molasses. It’s above sister restaurant the Celtic Hearth/Jennifer Bain
As the downpour continues, we take refuge in Bridie Molloy’s (an Irish pub and sister business to the Celtic Hearth) where toutons await.
I’m well acquainted with this fried (and sometimes baked) bread served with molasses so nibble politely as Dawe warns “there’s no saving ya from the jokes” if you say too-tens instead of tau-tens.
I’ve been to all these restaurants before, but she really brings them alive with her non-stop stories.
Nobody said food tours were easy. Here we grab mini fries, dressing, gravy and cod from a rainy and cold patio at the Duke of Duckworth/Jennifer Bain
Next up is the Duke of Duckworth, with English pub vibes. It’s slammed with soccer fans watching a game, so we are relegated to a leaky deck for fries, dressing and gravy with a few morsels of fish.
Dressing to a Newfoundlander is a bread and summer savoury stuffing. Fish always means cod, the fish at the heart of the province’s history, culture, economy and 1992 moratorium that threw upwards of 35,000 people out of work.
The biggest takeaway here at the Duke is that kitchen staff reportedly have to sign NDAs to be let in on the secret recipe for the impossibly light, crispy and not at all greasy battered fish.
A fish cake with a side of homemade tartar sauce and mustard pickles at the Ship/Jennifer Bain
Relieved to be on the home stretch, we pop into the Ship Pub & Kitchen, treasured for its long-running Wednesday folk night. I’m thrilled that it’s warm and quiet and that we only have to eat one fish cake (made from salt cod, mashed potatoes and summer savoury) with mustard pickles.
Dawe uses our time here to reminisce about how Smucker’s once threatened to discontinue a beloved mustard pickle brand, how the Big Stick Man (a giant bologna character) is more popular than Santa Claus at the Santa Claus Parade, and how locals swear by Pepsi and boycott Coca-Cola for shuttering its bottling plant here years ago.
“All my ranting and roaring aside, how did you like the fish cake?” she asks as we prepare to leave. “It’s fine to say that you did not like it. This is the most divisive thing on the tour.”
Fish cakes are just an excuse to eat mustard pickles, I figure. They’re great when the kitchen has properly soaked and rinsed most of the salt away, and wretched when they haven’t.
It’s never too cold for ice cream we learn outside Sweet Rock Ice Cream/Jennifer Bain
Dashing down the street to our final stop, Dawe waxes poetic about the unusual “garbage weather” in a province famous for its RDF (rain, drizzle, fog).
“I know it’s very cold and awful out — I will not make you eat outside,” she promises as we arrive at Sweet Rock Ice Cream & Aunt Sarah’s Chocolate Shop.
I cry uncle and ask for just a tasting spoon of Newfoundland-inspired ice cream made with Jam Jams (a popular sandwich cookie made at a factory right here in St. John’s).
“One last question for you. This is your pop quiz, so choose your favourite,” says Dawe by way of goodbye. “Are you stogged, are you chinched, are you block solid, are you good for nothing and fit for the bed? All to say — are you full?”
I’m happy to be wearing stretchy pants, and even though it’s only 5 o’clock, I’m ready for bed.
My bed at the music-themed JAG, a boutique hotel in downtown St. John’s/Jennifer Bain