How many times have you told an out-of-town friend they have to eat at the Hoito Restaurant?
The Bay Street restaurant is a hotspot in Thunder Bay, particularly for their Finnish pancakes. Their reputation reaches far and wide across Canada, mostly through word of mouth, which is why the local legend is being featured in the Food Network’s new series You Gotta Eat Here!
The show, hosted by Second City alum John Catucci, features restaurants all over the country that are bragged about by each town’s residents.
Catucci not only tastes the food each restaurant is famous for, but also ventures into the kitchens and lends a hand, learning each chef’s tricks and some of their secret recipes.
As a comic Catucci has been to Thunder Bay several times and each time he was encouraged to eat at the Hoito.
“I never had the chance, so when we go to shoot there it was fantastic,” he said. “It lived up to everybody’s recommendations. You can’t find them anywhere else in Canada; they are so unique to the Hoito, those Finnish pancakes, the really thin ones.”
The city’s pride in the Hoito was obvious by all the people the crew spoke to and Catucci said the Hoito baseball cap the staff gave him is now one of his favourites.
“They showed me how to flip pancakes, horribly,” he said with a laugh. “It was cool. I got to cook with the people, learn their recipes and make a huge mess.”
And of the dozens of restaurants he’s been to so far, the Hoito ranks high on the list.
“It felt like a really big family and that’s what’s really nice when you go into a restaurant. They bring you into their family,” he said. “There are a lot of restaurants like that across Canada. You could tell people are excited about the food they are cooking and they want other people to be excited as well.”
Thunder Bay wasn’t the only stop in Northwestern Ontario for You Gotta Eat Here! The crew also stopped at Busters BBQ in Vermillion Bay, a small burger shack known for their blueberry barbeque sauce.
“They definitely know what they’re doing,” said Catucci. “It’s just on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway, this little barbeque shack. If nobody told me, I would have just driven by there, but now that I know it’s there, if I’m ever back in that neighbourhood, I’m stopping for sure.”
“We ate so many ribs; we ate so much food when we were there,” he added.
While blueberry barbeque sauce may seem like an oddity, Catucci and the show’s crew came across many weird-sounding, but delicious-tasting, foods right across the country.
They came across every flavour of poutine imaginable, from lobster and clam to a slow-roasted boar poutine in Moncton, NB. That restaurant, The Tide and Boar, then coated the poutine with their homemade gravy. They also had their own homemade ketchup.
In Huntsville, Ont., Catucci helped make lasagna and gnocchi from scratch at a restaurant called That Little Place by the Lights.
You Gotta Eat Here! is a show for anyone who loves food, said Catucci, adding that since he’s not a chef, he brings a point-of-view from the everyday person.
“There’s still the possibility I’ll chop off a finger when I’m cutting an onion,” he said. “When I flip a pancake and it falls on the floor, that happens. There are a lot of real moments.”
“It’s going to be food and funny,” he added.
You Gotta Eat Here! Premieres on the Food Network – channel 49 on Shaw Cable – on Jan. 6 at 9 p.m.
