The Best Seafood in Canada

A painting of a Dalmatian anchors the dining room, which tells you something about the mood: elegant, but not stiff. This is a seafood-forward tasting restaurant in the Plateau where co-chefs Danny Smiles and Mitch Laughren cook with a clarity that favors the ingredient over the flourish. The pastry chef's reimagined classics are a reason to stay for dessert. It holds a spot on North America's 50 Best Restaurants list.

Hand-painted imported tile floors and marble-topped bars set the tone at this upscale seafood restaurant inside the Sutton Place Hotel on Burrard. The room is large but pulls together through chic lighting and buttery leather seating, and the menu matches the mood: baked oysters, house-made pasta loaded with Pacific shellfish, and a mixed shellfish platter that gets its own trio of sauces. Roger Ma took Vancouver Magazine's Chef of the Year in 2026.

The napkins are the size of bed sheets, which tells you everything about the food at this Lyonnaise French restaurant in Little Burgundy. Chef David McMillan has said he doesn't like creative food, and he means it: steaks, hand-picked oysters, rabbit, sweetbreads, and a lobster pasta that regulars treat as non-negotiable. The blackboard changes constantly. The wood bar and stag head on the wall make it feel like a neighborhood pub, which is more or less the idea.

The dry-aged fish program is the detail that separates this buzzy Fraser Street seafood spot from every other neighborhood bar doing a raw bar. The menu is small and shifts often, but the cooking stays bold and punchy, from hiramasa with aguachile to squid tagliolini that goes places pasta doesn't usually go. Vancouver Magazine gave it gold for both informal dining and seafood, and the Michelin Guide has taken notice too. Service is friendly without being precious.

Marcus Samuelsson's Canadian debut sits inside the Four Seasons Montreal, but the terrace restaurant earns its own look. The menu moves from crudos and seafood towers to robata-grilled cuts and whole fish, the kind of progression that suits a long, leisurely dinner rather than a quick bite. Expense accounts are comfortable here; personal ones survive happiest at happy hour. AAA Four Diamonds.

A casual Thai restaurant on East Broadway where the green curry beef shank reportedly stops conversations cold. Song holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and Vancouver Magazine's gold for best Thai, and the room feels built for lingering over pomelo salad and lemongrass wings with a group that shows up hungry. The menu runs deeper than the familiar standards, though the pad Thai earns its place on the table without apology.

This is a seafood restaurant with a wall of vintage etched mirrors and a menu that cheerfully ignores the rules. The focaccia arrives on a toddler's melamine alphabet plate, the caesar gets sprouting broccoli and tempura crunchies, and the margarita involves gingered rye and douglas fir. Now and then the spot prawn guy walks in mid-service with the day's catch, which is as close to a fish market as a mirror gallery gets.

Tadoussac sits where the Saguenay Fjord pours into the St. Lawrence, and the kitchen leans hard into that geography. This is a tasting-menu restaurant open only a few months a year, built around two tracks: one follows the land, with garden vegetables, foraged plants, and game; the other follows the river, with snow crab, lobster, and halibut. The seasoning stays spare so the ingredients do the talking, which takes some confidence when your ingredients are this specific to a place.

Fanny Bay runs its own shellfish farms, so the oysters on your tray were in the water embarrassingly recently. It's a seafood restaurant and raw bar on Cambie, a short walk from the stadiums, which explains why it fills up fast on game days. Sit at the bar and let the shucker guide you, or go for the grilled oysters, hot and bubbling with Creole butter. The Michelin Guide has it listed as a selected restaurant.

The menu at this seafood restaurant on Avenue du Mont-Royal shifts with whatever came off the boat, so the kitchen is essentially never cooking the same thing twice. The room fills fast and stays loud, which makes it feel more like a dinner party than a reservation. Counter seats are worth grabbing if you're solo. The Michelin Guide lists it among its selected Montreal restaurants.

Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the inner harbour at this polished downtown steakhouse, where the nautical decor leans into the setting without going full sailor. It draws a spendy waterfront crowd, but the kitchen is doing careful work beneath the glamour: the Louie salad with lump crab is a genuine reason to order it, and the fish and chips comes out lighter than you'd expect. A Michelin Selected Restaurant.

This seafood restaurant in Percé started life as a youth hostel for hippies and beatniks, and a few of the era's more radical guests left graffiti that's still on the ceiling. These days the revolution mostly involves splitting a seafood platter or a pizza on the terrace, with Rocher Percé sitting right there like a very large, very patient waiter. It's a casual, sit-down spot, and the view does a lot of the heavy lifting.