Halifax is a city that punches above its weight when it comes to its culinary scene. We have loads of talent, a farm-to-table ethos, some fantastic pubs, and affordable upscale options (compared to bigger cities). Moreover, we are a quickly growing city, with more and more multicultural options every day.
Sure, we have high taxes and low wages and a housing crises and people can’t afford groceries….
But hey, look: There’s the ocean!
We must have great seafood at least, right?…. Right?! … …
A theme that I’ve noticed over the years is that newcomers to Halifax are often less than impressed with our food. An unpopular (but pretty true, if I’m being honest) observation about Halifax is that we are a city that not only accepts, but embraces mediocrity. I have a few theories about this, but in the spirit of not taking this post too seriously…
Let’s admit it, guys. We’ve got some questionable local foods. Let’s examine this for a minute.
10 Reasons Why Halifax is the Worst Food City:
1. The Donair
The official food of Halifax is literally factory-made beef loaf in a soggy pita drenched with a sauce made by curdling sweetened milk with vinegar.
It was invented because the locals here thought yogurt and lamb were too “icky”. So the Greeks had to make a few tweaks to their beloved gyros to make it more approachable for these most refined of palates.
Donairs are also impossible to eat like a well proportioned pita wrap. There is so much meat that it will explode once you unravel the tinfoil. The best course of action is to lay it down open-faced on a table and pick at it with your hands until you can see the pita. But more likely you will be hunched over drunk on the curb with a slurry of grease and sticky sauce dripping down your arms and onto your pants.
Most visitors come to Halifax expecting something civilized like a shawarma wrap, but they quickly learn what a pinnacle of civilization we are.
Buy My Book: Book of Donair!
2. Meat Paste Egg Rolls
Haligonians love our Canadian Chinese food: sweet and sour chicken balls, sweet ginger beef, sweet and sour wontons, lemon chicken, pineapple chicken….. Do you see the theme here?
The only thing we love more than sweet shit is mystery meat.
So what could be better than a crispy egg roll with some sweet plum sauce?
A crispy egg roll filled with mysterious meat paste, of course!
And just to add insult to injury, newcomers will open their box of chow mein only to discover a bundle of bean sprouts and nary a noodle in sight.
If it sounds like chop suey, it is. Except we sprinkle crispy packaged noodles on top and call it a noodle dish.
Why are we this way? Nobody knows.
3. Peanut Butter Burgers
When you ask a local for the best burger in Halifax or must-eat delicacies, you’ll likely be told by a wide-eyed local to try the peanut butter burger at Darrell’s. For decades, Darrell’s has been the most celebrated burger restaurant in Halifax and the peanut butter burger has been the most celebrated burger.
But at the end of the day, it’s just a burger with peanut butter on it, folks. It’s not unique to Halifax, but we sure do like them!
Read more about peanut butter burgers.
4. Halifax-style Pepperoni
The most coveted pepperoni is the dry aged stuff that curls and makes crispy little cups of grease. Not so in Halifax!
Halifax-style pepperoni is actually a type of Polish sausage, smoked and spicy, with kind of a dense emulsified meatiness.
It’s often enjoyed cold (in party trays with cheese), or deep fried with honey mustard dipping sauce (because: sweet).
So, you’d think it would be common to find this style of pepperoni on pizza in Halifax. But, no. This is Halifax and that would make too much sense….
Read More about Halifax-style pepperoni.
5. Halifax Style Pizza
There are several cities known for their questionable style of pizza. Just look at St. Louis-style pizza. Hell, look at Altoona-style pizza or Ohio Valley-style pizza.
Our pizza may not be on that level of bad, but the weirdest thing about Halifax pizza is the disparity between local acclaim and how our pizza is received by people who move here from other places.
Locals: “This {insert local shop} is the best pizza in Canada, hands down!”
(Why is it always hands down?)
People from literally anywhere else (including Cape Breton):
How can there be such incongruence?
Newcomers to Halifax are horrified to learn that we typically put our pepperoni underneath the cheese. We do this because pizza shops use really cheap deli meat style pepperoni and salami. Meanwhile, they showcase the industrial (out-of-a-bag) balls of indistinguishable sausage and bacon right on top!
The old school places (like Pizza Time or Sasy’s) at least have traditional pizza ovens and produce a pretty nice crust with a puffy edge and hint of char. Unfortunately, the vast majority of pizza joints in Halifax use conveyor belt ovens and are limp and sad.
6. Our Seafood
Nova Scotia has a long history of seafood cookery, but if you consult an old cookbook or a local’s kitchen, you’ll quickly notice that we love to overcook our seafood and drench it with butter and cream. That’s pretty much our whole repertoire.
Here’s a little secret, though: Tourists come here thinking they are eating all of this seafood straight out of the ocean, and that just isn’t the case. Yes, even your favourite fish and chips place is probably not getting its fish fresh from the wharf, but rather fish caught in international waters and frozen-at-sea.
We export our catch to the highest bidder, and then import seafood from Scandinavia and Asia.
I’m sorry. I don’t make the rules.
This doesn’t apply to lobster, sea scallops, oysters and mussels which are always local or local(ish). And there are obviously restaurants selling local seafood… just don’t assume that all seafood in the city is local. Even (or especially) from seafood restaurants.
I know of at least two seafood specialty restaurants that use twice-frozen haddock from China. And I’ve had countless bowls of chowder full of farmed shrimp and scallops from Asia.
I’m not gonna name names and ignorance is bliss, right? But if you see small scallops and big shrimp – I’ve got bad news for you.
Oh, and all of our salmon is farmed. Look for sustainable inland farms like Sustainable Blue or Cape D’Or.
7. And if you think we have good sushi, we don’t.
Alas, being oceanside also doesn’t guarantee good sushi. A strong market does, so ironically, places like Calgary have better sushi than Halifax. ‘Cus it’s not like sushi is made with raw fish off the docks. It’s generally frozen to a certain temperature in order to kill parasites and shipped around the world. So the international market does its thing. (The one exception is tuna. A very small handful of local sushi restaurants will occasionally get a bluefin tuna that has a shark bite (or some other flaw rendering it not exportable) and you can find amazing otoro when in season).
But none of that matters. The majority of Haligonians opt for all-you-can-eat garbage or base their loyalty on free maki rolls handed out to diners. The more sweet sauces and mayonnaise draping the smorgasbord of fruit and cheese and 5 types of fish the better!
8. Our Terrible Chicken Wings
In Halifax chicken wings are almost always breaded, but dry rubs are not particularly popular because Haligonians would rather toss their breaded wings in sauce for optimal sogginess.
For this reason, it is also common to order sauce on the side. In addition to hot sauce (true Buffalo sauce is rare), we tend to like sweeter sauces (of course) like honey garlic, maple this or barbecue that.
And they are expensive! The going rate is $17+ for a basket.
9. Our Inappropriate Use of BBQ Sauce
**Rant warning**
If I haven’t been clear enough: Haligonians love sweet shit. Our official food, after all, is basically a gyros with frosting on it. We love honey mustard, honey garlic and teriyaki sauce and we put them in the most inappropriate places. Pub menus are a case study in sweet Thai chili sauce.
Maple curry pasta? Barbecue sauce on a Philly cheesesteak?
Why not?!
How many times have I had to say “hold the honey (or BBQ sauce or sweet Thai chili sauce)” on a plate of nachos? Once would be too many.
But don’t get me started on BBQ Chicken Pizza.
Too late: I’ve started.
First of all, chicken doesn’t belong on pizza. I’ll die on that hill. But combined with sickeningly sweet BBQ sauce, it is simply a travesty I cannot bear. And if you think pineapple on pizza is controversial, guess what? We like to put that on our BBQ chicken pizza too, because: “need more sweet!”
10. The Chickenburger
One of the most iconic restaurants in Halifax is the Chickenburger, dating back to the 1940s. I am actually one of those weird locals who loves the Chickenburger, mostly due to childhood nostalgia. It was the place my family would stop on our way back into the city, and I would put Monster Mash on the jukebox while waiting for my order: a chickenburger with onion rings and a chocolate milkshake.
But newcomers to the city do not understand the popularity of the chickenburger, because they are expecting a breaded chickenburger like you would find at Popeyes. Oh, no…ho ho no.
A chickenburger is plain chicken meat in a plain bun, with the only condiments being the grease and steam from the meat.
I find a simple perfection in this. But most people feel flabbergasted and duped and rightly so. Jokes are made about geriatric cuisine, and that’s fine. I’m in my 40s now – a geriatric millennial, and I don’t need truffle oil, chipotle mayo and gochujang on everything I eat.
Overpriced conventional frozen fries and onion rings round out the meal. The milkshakes, by the way, are like drinking melted ice cream. Thin and terrible. Yet they always win awards for best milkshake in the city. Go figure.
So, what do you think? Are you a newcomer to Halifax and feel validated by my post? Are you a triggered local? Are you ambivalent, as am I? Is this an April Fool’s joke? Either way, I hope you enjoyed the post and didn’t take it too seriously. If you are a regular reader you know I love and promote the Halifax food scene… but maybe we need just a teensy bit of reevaluation?
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