New year, new culinary dawn for the North?

The North is slowly creeping toward a culinary boom, according to some restaurateurs and tour operators who say a richer dining experience is just around the corner.

"I think things have changed," says Eric Pateman, the president of food tourism operator Edible Canada.

Pateman's company will send 60 guests on a food adventure across Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in June 2017, chartering a Boeing 737 for the week-long trip.

Pateman will be on board, as will leading Canadian chefs. Stops include dinner on a private Whitehorse island with author and cook Michele Genest; an aviation-themed meal with Yellowknife chef Robin Wasicuna; an Inuit lunch in Rankin Inlet; and maybe dinner on a moving ice floe off Iqaluit.

A trip like this has not been done before. The cost? Just under $12,000 plus tax, per person.

"I fell in love with the North the people, place, sense of community and the food scene," says Pateman. "I was blown away by what was being grown and what was available.

"It's unique in that you find a lot of wild foraged foods, wild game meats, and multicultural influences as well. Some of the best Mexican I've had anywhere in North America was up in Whitehorse."

'People have to start doing things differently,' says Yellowknife chef

Edible Canada feels the North's time has come. However, while many may have the stomach for that trip, they might lack the wallet to match.

For diners with more modestbudgets, some locals are less convinced northern Canada is a food destination yet.

"It's not. But that's not meant as a criticism," says Yellowknife resident and self-proclaimed food tourist Mike Kalnay.

"Canada is not a food destination. That said, there are plenty of people who come to Canada to see Canada and they eat well while they're here. So there's a huge market in the tourism sector for food and dining.

"But there's a big gap between the product that's available here now and the kind of thing that the [food tourism] crowd wants."

Yellowknife chef Wasicuna says local enthusiasm, more than tourism, is driving the city's nascent food scene.

"People who are choosing to stay, instead of coming to work for a few years then moving on, are the kind of people demanding change in our culinary landscape," says the proprietor of Yellowknife's Twin Pine Diner.

"For a town of less than 20,000 people, we have like five pizzerias and six Chinese food places, which is borderline ridiculous. People have to start doing things differently and taking a chance.

"Come at me, show me something. Then I can respond. And when another restaurant joins that fray, you've got three restaurants in town playing off each other. That's how a culinary scene grows. That's how collaborative it can be."

'We play off what we have locally'

On cue, another Chinese restaurant opened in Yellowknife this month. However, its managers say they are doing exactly what Wasicuna demands: offering something new.

The restaurant, YK Hotpot, explicitly targets Asian tourists with multilingual signs and menus. The food is presented as authentic Chinese hotpot cuisine.

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Within weeks of opening, YK Hotpot's Cissy Qiao says the response has been "beyond expectations," mostly thanks to tourists filling the seats.

"Hotpot is something of our culture. Everybody likes it in China, so when they see that there is a hotpot they will come here," explains Qiao, who moved up from Vancouver to take the job.

"In the summer, we investigated the food and beverage business in Yellowknife and realized there was not a sufficient variety of Chinese food in this town. We thought we might bring something new, and local people told us everybody was waiting for something new and different."

A Chinese restaurant catering to foreign guests could be more likely to shelter tourists from local cuisine than promote it, but Qiao says HotPot wantsto include northern fare.

"So far, we are offering whitefish," she says. "I'm trying to get more things added to our menu, to try to bring some specialties to tourists to show what's special in Yellowknife."

However, that's not as straightforward as you might think.

For example, in almost all of Canada, wild game is subject to a range of restrictions which bar the meat from sale in restaurants. As a consequence, some popular dishes in northern communities cannot be served.

"We're not allowed to use wild game in our restaurants here so we tend to substitute, buying farmed rabbits or bison," says Wasicuna, "or quail to substitute for ptarmigan.

"We play off what we have locally, but we do it with what we're allowed to use."

Changing the rules to make selling northern meat easier would take time and government inclination, but Wasicuna says that would make a profound difference.

"Things are starting to change. I'm hoping to work with the government to try to help introduce that," he says. "That alone could increase culinary tourism."