Trip Report! Newfoundland: Day Four

Our fourth day in Newfoundland was the best food day of the trip so hang onto your hats!

We started at Philip's Cafe in Placentia. He doesn't open until June, but serves breakfast for guests at the B&B. Philip is a Newfoundland native and a long haul truck driver in the winter so he was pretty interesting to talk to. He said that almost all of his customers are tourists, not natives, because his food is considered too weird by the locals. It wasn't the least bit weird - quiche, fruit and yogurt, etc. - but I guess it's outside of the traditional norms for rural Newfoundland. He made us a seemingly basic meal of ham and eggs and potatoes and toast but everything was perfectly prepared.

He insisted on taking our picture about five times.

After breakfast we drove to the Trinity area, about 3 hours to the north. We stayed in Port Rexton on the other side of a little inlet from Trinity proper, at the Fisher's Loft Inn. This is a genuinely fancy place, a rural inn that reminded us in general tone of the hacienda where we stayed last year outside of Arcos de la Frontera. This is the place where all the Hollywood people stayed when they filmed The Shipping News a few years ago. They were running a May special - any room for $99 a night! - so naturally I opted for an ocean view suite.

We met this cat outside the reception building.

He absolutely insisted on going inside with us and then refused to let Ben put him down, purring like crazy during the entire check-in process. What a good buddy!

Our room was great! A big living room!

And a nice bedroom too. 

This is Port Rexton and the ocean from our room. I could not get enough of this view.

Philip had told us to check out the puffin site in Elliston, about 20 miles farther up the peninsula, so we set out to do that after getting settled in. Turning off the main road, this is what you see heading into Elliston.

They are not kidding. It's about five kilometers but it took ages because the road was so awful we had to keep it to about 20 mph. The fog was really thick and there was nobody else around. 

Finally we reached Ellison and found a little restaurant.

This restaurant turned out to be AWESOME. The owner and her cook were both super friendly - they gave us a little book to read about the area and chatted with us quite a bit. The owner told us the roads have been terrible ever since a hurricane in 2010 did a lot of damage to the area.

They also gave us free crab rolls as an appetizer! The filling was similar to crab rangoon except with actual crab mixed into the cream cheese. They were delicious!

I got a grilled cheese and a bowl of tomato vegetable soup. I don't know why the sandwich looks tiny here. It was normal sized.

Benjamin got the pulled moose sandwich. Afterward he asked the cook, "so do you have a local source for moose, then?" and the guy said, "oh, no, that's my moose. I shot it." Well! That's pretty awesome! Local cuisine.

We split a partridgeberry crumble for dessert. This was our first partridgeberry experience and we were big fans! They are the same thing as lingonberries.

The restaurant lady gave us directions to the puffins so we headed out and found it without too much trouble. This area is similar to Cape St. Mary's, a peninsula leading out to a rock disconnected from the mainland where the birds roost and breed in the summertime.

The weather out there was intense. We are pretty sure it was sleeting, but the wind was so crazy it may have just been really hard tiny raindrops. Either way, it was not a place you'd want to spend a lot of time. We saw the most icebergs yet!

Unfortunately the puffins were not around. We only saw two! Here is one of them.

COLD.

Look at all the icebergs, though! Worth it!

We ate dinner at the Fishers Loft. They do a different prix fixe menu every night - it was our only expensive meal of the trip. 

The amuse bouche was lobster salad with a little sesame cracker thing.

Followed by potato leek soup.

And then baby greens with grapes and blue cheese.

Entree was halibut with romesco sauce served over orzo and lentils.

And our dessert was a thick chocolate mousse with blueberry sauce. 

It was all wonderful. There is something that makes a nice dinner seem extra fancy when you are sitting in a tiny fishing village in the middle of nowhere with crazy wind and rain raging outside.