A Walk Through Time in Old New Brunswick

ST. ANDREWS-BY-THE-SEA, Canada —  When Robert and Lynda Estes moved to this little seaside town as new owners of the Rossmount Inn, they walked through the rooms, removed all the pictures and banished them to the barn.

After the couple tallied their money, they realized that new art was not in their budget. They then rehung the paintings they liked best.

Thus, practicality took over at this New Brunswick inn. Also, a good sense of humor.

“TV’s Bob Newhart Show has no relationship to running a country inn,” Robert Estes said. He believes the British television series Fawlty Towers, which starred John Cleese as bumbling innkeeper Basil Fawlty, is closer to reality.

“The first year was really very frustrating and tiring,” Estes said, “but the third is much better. We feel an emotional tie with the inn. In the first couple of years we were just custodians; now I find myself being prejudicial about who should stay here.”

The three-story inn, which has 16 bedrooms, each with its own bath, stands at the head of a long driveway off the road leading to St. Andrews from the Trans-Canada Highway.

A swimming pool and deck are surrounded by fields of wildflowers and, in the distance, are tree-covered hills. The Esteses and their staff of 10, mostly college students, earned an Automobile Club Four Diamond award for the Rossmount in 1988.

In the main hallway, two ornately carved wooden panels salvaged from a ship serve as massive door frames. Carved lintels, stained-glass panels and Oriental rugs set off the satin-toned wood.

An elaborate wooden bar is framed with pewter and earthenware tankards. While no-smoking rules prevail in the dining room, desserts and coffee can be served in the bar or on the porch, where smoking is permitted.

Robert is manager, handyman, maitre d’hotel and bartender, while Lynda, who trained in Los Angeles, does the cooking. The menu changes frequently.

“We change from blackberry season to raspberry season and then to rhubarb and such,” she said. “We have swordfish in July and early August only, with the salmon just about gone by mid-July and lobster in season. One of the advantages is that New Brunswick is so small you can call the suppliers at home if you need something.”

The Rossmount opens in the spring and closes for the winter at the end of October.

A little over a hour away is Kings Landing, a recreation of an historic village in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Costumed residents who have studied the history of each house and farm relocated here and the life stories of its original inhabitants populate the dwellings and fields, going about their routine chores while visitors area free to observe and ask questions.

In Sackville, near the narrow strip of land connecting New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Mary and John Blakely run the Marshlands Inn, a Victorian town home with a carriage house in the back and 25 rooms, some with private baths and some with shared facilities.

The Blakelys, from England, bought the century-old inn in 1984 after Mary had worked for the previous owners as a bookkeeper. John was a brewery chemist in England before moving to Canada and becoming a forensic toxicologist for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Running a country inn “is something we’ve always wanted to do,” Mary said. “It’s very hard on you--you have to love it.” Helping are two of the Blakely’s four children.

The family provides entertainment and parties for guests, including small-cast theater productions, mystery weekends and fashion show luncheons. The inn allows children and dogs (“We have some of both ourselves.”) and permits smoking in some rooms.

Breakfasts consist of creamy old-fashioned oatmeal with brown sugar and cream, fresh-squeezed orange juice, kippers, eggs and Canadian bacon, thick slices of toasted homemade bread, gooseberry and rhubarb jam, buckwheat pancakes with real maple syrup and little pots of brewed tea instead of tea bags.

At lunchtime, guests sample Marshlands codfish cakes and poached eggs, homemade soups, sandwiches, salads, liver and onions or salt cod and pork scraps with whole boiled potatoes.

Visitors to Sackville can see the only North American harness shop still producing handmade horse collars, go bird watching on the marshes, study the Tidal Bore, a fast-moving high tide on the Petitcodiac River, or pack a picnic lunch and set out for Bay of Fundy National Park.

About 100 miles away, Gagetown is an old town southeast of Fredericton on the meandering Saint John River with a population of about 600, most of them artists and craftsmen. The notable Loomcrafters, who create handwoven tartans, linens, afghans, ties, aprons and cushions, open their studios from early May to the end of October.

In Gagetown the six-room Victorian-style lodging called Steamers Stop Inn is, along with Rossmount and Marshlands, one of the historic Heritage Inns of New Brunswick. Each of its rooms is named for a steamboat or paddle-wheeler that once cruised the Saint John River.

Lunches and dinners are served indoors or on a shady porch overlooking the river, and include local dishes such as cream of fiddlehead soup, fish chowder, Bay of Fundy scallops and old-fashioned chicken and dumplings.

If you overnight here on a Friday, get up early the next morning and hurry over to Fredericton’s Boyce Farmers Market for breakfast at New Brunswick’s most unusual restaurant.

Every Saturday morning from 7 a.m. to noon Ruth Chappell takes on the persona of a character called Goofy Roofy at a restaurant/eating stall of the same name. There she swaps wisecracks and insults with market vendors, politicians and visiting celebrities while she whips up her famous egg specialties.

About 160 miles north, in the tiny seaside town of Nigadoo on the Acadian coast near Baie des Chaleurs, Hilda and Georges Franchon operate La Fine Grobe-Sur-Mer (fine grub by the sea). While the bay is famous for a ghost ship seen with sails aflame, the restaurant is renowned for Georges’ French cuisine. He comes from Chambery in the Haut-Savoie region of France. His wife is an Acadian from New Brunswick.

Some foods are prepared on an outdoor oven that is used for baking bread, roasting lamb and cooking Georges’ Savoy-style scalloped potatoes.

Two of the best dishes on the menu are lobster thermidor with onions, mushrooms and shallots, and a platter of steamed lobster, crab, scallops and shrimp napped in a lemony hollandaise and accompanied by spinach fresh from the Franchon’s garden.

In the winter Georges the chef turns into Georges the potter, Hilda returns to her painting and the inn becomes what it was originally--a crafts center and school where the two of them teach art.

“There are always more people eating three meals a day than buying art,” Georges said. “So we said: ‘Why not bring the customers in by their belly?’ ”

Between courses, diners can browse among the gallery shelves that surround the dining room. The result is that more than one diner takes away an artistic as well as culinary remembrance from La Fine Grobe.

About an hour’s drive away is the Acadian Historical Village, another living history museum depicting the lives of Acadian settlers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

At a fisherman’s cottage, called the Godin house, you can talk to an actress playing the role of a housewife while she prepares a molasses cake and a beef fricot for the midday meal.

You also can hold a freshly inked, handprinted, newspaper page made by a printer and watch as fresh codfish just unloaded from a fishing boat is cleaned and put on wooden racks to dry in the sun.

If You Go: Rossmount Inn, St. Andrews by-the-Sea, (506) 529-3341, about $75 double; Marshlands Inn, Sackville, (506) 536-0170, $60 double with private bath, $45 without; Steamers Stop Inn, Gagetown, (506) 488-2903, $40 double, shared bath; La Fine Grobe-Sur-Mer, Nigadoo, (506) 783-3138, $40 double, shared bath.