Prince Edward Island: Where to Eat

Okay. I admit it. I’m a true lobster freak. This is especially odd since I live in Kansas but it was bred into me when my grandfather took me as a child  to the Savoy, then the best and maybe the only place in Kansas City for lobster.

So when we drove our motorhome to Prince Edward Island Canada, the first thing we did was begin looking for places to eat lobster. It is a given that, short of Maine, PEI has the best lobsters in the world but when we stumbled on St. Ann’s Catholic Church, we knew we had quite literally arrived in heaven.

We heard they originally began serving dinner once a week to help pay off a $35,000 loan and we were happy to try and help them do that. I can’t speak for now, but we and our friends Lillian and Jim Chapman trekked down their basement steps not knowing what to expect. What we got were buckets of steam mussels, all the perfectly cooked lobsters we could eat, bowls of melted butter and an assortment of other stuff we didn’t care about. (Jim couldn’t resist the homemade apple pie but the rest of us were too full.)

I know things have changed a bit since we were there. Prices have gone up and the ladies of the church no longer volunteer as waitresses but I’m betting the lobsters and mussels are as good as ever.

We loved Prince Edward Island. So did our dachshund Dudley. He was a wave chaser. He loved playing in water, even puddles after a rainstorm but his favorite thing to do was follow waves out and then try to beat them back to shore. We took him to the beaches up and down the north shore and all the way to the lighthouses at either end of the island. If you make it to the lighthouse, they give you a certificate. Dudley got one from each lighthouse he visited.

He was about as big as a good size lobster and must have related to them on some level because he wouldn’t touch them, or mussels either and Prince Edward Island mussles are special. They are grown on vertical strings in the ocean waters so they never touch the ocean floor and thus don’t get gritty.

PEI is a little over 2000 miles from Kansas City but if you love lobster and have a dog that loves the ocean, it’s definitely worth the drive.