North America's unsung autumn alternative to New England
Little Louis’ does not look like a restaurant that is about to seduce my tastebuds. Set into a cluster of retail units on the west side of the small New Brunswick city of Moncton, it resembles, at first glance, more a place where I might take my dry cleaning rather than eat well.
But I have been advised to try it – and the suggestion proves well founded. The blue pearl oysters are local heroes newly plucked from the ocean; the scallops in green curry are just as fresh. Both are recommended by a waitress whose accent flits between Anglo-Saxon and Gallic; the Canadian compromise. When I set down my dessert spoon, I am happy and full. And I wonder, not for the last time, what John Steinbeck would have made of it.
It is not as odd a thought as it sounds. In the autumn of 1960, America’s great chronicler of the Depression era embarked on a meandering road trip around his own country. The resultant book, Travels With Charley(Charley being his poodle), found him relishing (for the most part) an odyssey of back-roads, unheralded towns, little eateries and random conversational encounters. And it still felt gloriously alive on the page an exact half-century on, when I tracked the route of its early chapters along the shore of New England.
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