These chefs left the city to open rural and small-town restaurants. Was it a good move?

Some of Canada’s most interesting chefs are turning up in the most unlikely places.

In small towns, fishing villages and on working farms across Canada, accomplished chefs are opening ambitious restaurants far from the big cities where they made their names. And diners are following them, unfazed by the hours of driving often required to get there.

Helped by the growth of agri-tourism and interest in food provenance, the popularity of rural restaurants is reflected in this year’s Canada’s 100 Best restaurant list, which includes a half dozen such spots, from the Michelin-star eatery The Pine in Creemore, Ont., to Pluvio in Ucluelet, B.C.

Jacob Richler, editor-in-chief and publisher of Canada’s 100 Best, says the appeal of rural restaurants has “everything to do with the feeling that what you are experiencing belongs to that particular setting.” Diners want to know who grew the vegetables, raised the meat or caught the fish. Plus, many are looking for more than just a nice meal: One-quarter want an experiential dining experience, according to OpenTable Canada’s 2026 Dining Trends Report.

“It’s not conventional fine dining, and no urban restaurant can deliver it quite like a country one can,” he says.

The Globe spoke with three chefs, for whom leaving the city was as much a personal decision as a culinary one. They were drawn to small towns for different reasons: family, a slower pace, relief from high city rents, and, perhaps most importantly, the chance to cook closer to where their food is grown, raised and caught.

By the time Guillaume Asselin decided to leave Montreal, the chef had become so busy running a restaurant, a catering company and a sugar shack that he barely had time for the thing that had drawn him into the business in the first place.

“I missed cooking,” he says.

After seven years owning and operating the popular east-end Montreal bistro Les Affamés, Asselin was exhausted. He had also grown frustrated by the distance between his kitchen and the food arriving in it.

“I wanted to have the best produce and know where everything comes from,” he says. “I wanted to do things from seed to the vegetables on the plate. I wanted the animals I raised to have a nice life.”

In 2019, he told his partner, Marie Daudelin, that he wanted land and a true farm-to-table restaurant. Daudelin was game: She had always dreamed of running a country inn, she told him, like something out of Gilmore Girls.

The couple ventured southwest into the fertile Montérégie countryside and found Saint-Anicet, home to a 126-acre farm that had sat empty for four years.

“A week later we made an offer,” says Asselin, who was no farm hand but was determined to learn.

The romantic vision required unromantic work. The couple scraped paint, rebuilt fences, planted gardens and renovated neglected outbuildings.

What emerged was Le Mangeoir, a 32-seat table champêtre, or farm-to-table, and four-room farm stay.

A visit begins with a tour of the farm. Then the guests gather around a large harvest table for a five-course meal.

The farm raises all of the restaurant’s meat – pigs, cows, goats, rabbits, chickens and ducks – and produces almost everything that appears on the plate. There are laying hens, vegetable gardens, berries and an expanding orchard of apple, cherry and pear trees. A small boutique sells cuts of meat with Asselin’s preserves, pickles and hot sauce.

“Le Mangeoir’s financial viability depends on how the farm, restaurant and accommodation work together,” says Asselin, who notes that producing their own ingredients costs less than buying equivalent products elsewhere. “This model requires significant, ongoing investment, a great deal of personal involvement and a very long-term vision, particularly when you don’t have millions of dollars to start with.”

He loves the challenge of cooking only what he grows or nurtures. It has made him more inventive, and he says the work is more rewarding.

Goat has become a house specialty. Jerusalem artichokes might appear three ways; a purée, crisp chips or pickled. Asselin ferments pine cones, and makes kimchi as well as his own spices.

Guests, he says, love the authenticity of his farm-to-table meals. He loves the slower pace of country life. “I work just as much, maybe more, but it never feels like work,” he says. “I just live.”

In Montreal, his days came with the sound of traffic. “Here, I listen to the goats, the birds, the ducks,” he says. “It’s beautiful.”

Benjamin Cormier spent years believing that success meant leaving home. Now, at 42, the chef has built the life he never even knew he wanted, just 30 minutes from the small fishing community he grew up in.

“I thought I had to be a big-city boy,” says Cormier, chef-owner of Origines Cuisine Maritime in Caraquet, a charming Acadian coastal town in northeast New Brunswick. “But this place did not hold me back. In fact, it has helped me.”

His route back home was anything but planned. Cormier grew up in nearby Lamèque, an island community where commercial fishing and peat moss are the mainstays. He recalls the first traffic light arrived when he was 17.

After studying hotel and restaurant management in Ottawa, Cormier landed a job in his early 20s managing a restaurant attached to the New Brunswick Aquarium in Shippagan, a town next to Lamèque. A few months later, he stepped in to help cook when the chef quit. “I’ve never left the kitchen, and that was 19 years ago,” he says.

Cooking competitions followed, then an apprenticeship at Moncton’s acclaimed Little Louis’ Oyster Bar and Fine Cuisine. Within 18 months, he was sous chef, and eventually executive chef, a position he held for eight years and loved.

Then serendipity intervened again. Organizers of an annual wine dinner in Caraquet suddenly found themselves without a restaurant (the owner went bankrupt) and called Cormier, the local boy cooking in Moncton. Cormier agreed to be guest chef. Soon, people were whispering in his ear about coming home.

He was intrigued but wary. He had a good thing going in Moncton, the most populated city in New Brunswick. So, he hedged his bets, cooking at Little Louis’ during the week and driving three hours to run weekend pop-ups in Caraquet.

“I did that for six months and we were sold out every night,” he says. Eight years ago, he made the move to Caraquet permanent.

Origines is a relaxed, 60-seat restaurant where the cooking is ambitious and firmly rooted in the peninsula. Menus change weekly with the seasons and tides: cooked oysters with pickled ramps, chorizo and hollandaise; Arctic char tartare; scallops with pork belly. His customers think nothing of driving three, four and five hours to eat there, often staying in local hotels.

Becoming truly local took time. Cormier says he had to earn farmers’ trust and collect fishermen’s cellphone numbers so they would call him before selling their catch elsewhere. Now he’s on their speed dial.

What he appreciates most is how he’s close to family. His father, once a resolute plain-food-with-ketchup man, eats at Origines every week or two. Cormier’s partner, Monique Snow, runs the front of house.

When it comes to profitability of a rural restaurant, Cormier says there are some downsides. It costs more to get some higher-end products delivered, and you can’t reach the same ceiling of profitability as city restaurants.

“One could argue that the choice is not only financial,” says Cormier, who was able to pay off the restaurant quickly. “We work less days and we don’t have any issues paying all our bills and having a profit at the end of the year.”

He added, “The overall quality of life is improved once a business owner no longer has debt or financial stress, which is what I personally chose and I’m happy I made that choice.”

Cormier knows hard work got him here, but luck was a factor, too. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think this would happen when I came back home,” says Cormier, who travels internationally at the invitation of chefs he knows around the world. “This move has been the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Jeremy Austin travelled halfway around the world to discover that the restaurants he wanted to create belonged close to home.

Raised in Thornbury, Ont., Austin spent years cooking in Europe and Asia, working alongside Michelin-starred chefs and absorbing the food cultures around him.

By the time he and his wife, Cassie, were living in Shanghai, the pace of big-city life was wearing thin. They wanted to be closer to family and had long talked about opening a restaurant together.

“When we started travelling the world, we knew we wanted to bring those stories back home,” Austin says. “The best way to do that was through a tasting menu.”

The idea began modestly, with small groups eating at a table in Cassie’s parents’ Creemore farmhouse. In 2020, the couple opened The Pine in a tiny, 700-square-foot Collingwood space; four years later, they moved it to a former Shell gas station in Creemore.

Across 20-plus courses at The Pine, Austin draws heavily on Chinese dishes, then reshapes them into something that reflects what grows nearby. The countryside gives them access to some of the best ingredients, but also imposes limits, he says.

“It’s a double-edged sword but it makes us resourceful.”

The Pine has had a Michelin star for the past three years.

In May, he opened Lore in Collingwood, which was Michelin-recommended in September. Reinterpreting traditional Canadian dishes, Lore’s poutine becomes potato dumplings with braised short rib and aged-cheddar fondue, while the Caesar cocktail inspires B.C. albacore tuna with tomato broth and pickled surf clams.

Being a big fish in a smaller pond has given Austin the freedom – and confidence – to experiment and create food that is deeply personal to him. There are some unexpected costs to running two rural restaurants: Snow removal has cost him around $13,000 each season. But the cheaper lease “allows us to have intimate spaces and not need to do as many covers each night as we would in the city.”

But what he loves most is the community he gets to live and work in.

He and Cassie can hike on a Sunday afternoon, take a drive in the country or bring their daughter to the beach. “Why would I ever want to trade that for anything else?”