Tasty food trails to explore in Ontario and Quebec

If you’re the type who never takes a road trip without packing a cooler, here are some food trails and beverage routes in Eastern Ontario, the Outaouais and beyond that might pique your interest and get your stomach rumbling.

• Immediately southwest of Ottawa, the Sip and Savour Lanark County trail features lots of maple syrup (that’s Lanark County’s claim to culinary fame, after all) but also takes you to food shops, distilleries, restaurants and more.
• The Outaouais Gourmet Way is a set of five itineraries ranging far and wide to include food and beverage makers across West Quebec. There’s an app, too.

• The Tap and Cork Route features makers of wine, beer, cider and spirits in Ontario’s Ottawa Valley and the Pontiac region of Quebec. (P.S.: Guest author Katharine Fletcher wrote a great post about the route for Ottawa Road Trips in 2019.)
• This post from the Culinary Tourism Alliance points out stops for wine and/or cheese in Cornwall and Stormont-Dundas-Glengarry.
• It isn’t a set-in-stone route, but the Prince Edward County Winegrowers Association has a website and app that let you create your own driving itinerary to visit more than 35 wineries.

• The Prince Edward County Taste Trail features restaurants, farmers’ markets, cider makers and more. (Note that the link is to a PDF of a brochure that’s now a couple of years old.)
• The Kawarthas Northumberland Butter Tart Tour takes you to more than 50 Peterborough-area purveyors of the tooth-achingly sweet Canadian treat.
• Not to be outdone, Wellington County (in and around Guelph) has a butter tart map.
• Speaking of sweets, the Southern Georgian Bay area (around Meaford, Thornbury and Blue Mountain) has an Apple Pie Trail.

• If you’re headed to Stratford to enjoy some Shakespeare, you could also check out the Stratford Chocolate Trail.
• This is far from the most high-tech website you’ll ever use, but on a site that identifies itself only as OBN (Ontario Beverage Network? Your guess is as good as mine), you can download a detailed PDF map of Ontario craft breweries, distilleries and cideries.
• Not so much a trail as a list of suggestions, this post from the Culinary Tourism Alliance highlights all sorts of dumpling spots across Toronto—whether your fave dumplings are Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Ukrainian or Turkish.
• Quite a hike from Ottawa, in the southwestern corner of Ontario around Woodstock, the Oxford County Cheese Trail features 24 stops for fans of cheesy comestibles.

• Also a hike (but well worth the drive), the Charlevoix region east of Quebec City is a rich agricultural area full of cheese shops, mushroom growers, dairy farms and what have you. You can discover many of them on the Charlevoix Flavour Trail.
• On the website of the Eastern Townships’ tourism board, you can download separate guides to microbreweries, cheesemakers and wineries in this scenic region of Quebec near the Vermont border.

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