Matane

I’ll admit the reason I first stopped in Matane was practical rather than romantic — this is where the ferry crosses the St. Lawrence to Baie-Comeau and Godbout on the North Shore, and I’d timed my Gaspé loop around the crossing schedule. But Matane earned a longer stay than the layover I’d planned. The town sits at the mouth of the Matane River, and every restaurant along the main street seemed to be built around a single ingredient: the Matane shrimp, a small, sweet cold-water crevette that the town has built its entire culinary identity around, celebrated every summer with a shrimp festival that shuts down the waterfront for a long weekend of eating.

We ate them three different ways over two days — cold with just lemon at a wharf-side counter, in a bisque that a woman running a tiny restaurant near the lighthouse insisted was her grandmother’s recipe, and in a roll that reminded me, structurally if not in flavour, of a Maine lobster roll. Lia, who has strong opinions about seafood after growing up near Brittany, rated the cold preparation the best — the shrimp itself needed nothing added to it, sweet and dense in a way that farmed shrimp never manages.

Beyond the shrimp, Matane has a genuinely worthwhile salmon ladder at the Matane Wildlife Reserve dam, where Atlantic salmon returning to spawn can be watched through an underwater viewing window as they pass upstream — an odd, quiet pleasure, standing in a small dim room watching fish fight a current on the other side of a pane of glass. The town’s lighthouse and adjacent maritime museum cover the harbor’s long history as a fishing and shipping point, and the beach along the promenade gives a clean view west along the coast, back toward Rimouski and the widening river.

When to go: Late June through early July for the shrimp festival and peak season landings. July through September for the salmon run at the wildlife reserve dam. Book the ferry crossing to the North Shore in advance if you’re continuing that direction — sailings fill up in summer.