The menu at Le Moque-Tortue is French in its manners and Acadian in its accent. Read it closely and you’ll find dishes that speak the way this coast speaks: D’mi-peck de moukes, Mêlez-vous d’mes onions, Le gros fricot d’l’excentrique. The spelling is deliberate. So is the cooking.
Summer savoury
If Acadian cooking has a signature, it’s summer savoury, the small, peppery herb that goes into the stew pot, the meat pie, and most of what a grandmother cooks between September and April. Our fresh herbs come from La Ferme Spirale in Cocagne, a few minutes up the shore.
The fricot
Fricot is the Acadian stew: chicken, potatoes, carrots, onions, and celery in a broth that tastes of savoury. Every family has its version and considers the others slightly wrong. Ours is served with or without dumplings, with grilled bread, and it is the dish most likely to make a visitor from Cocagne go quiet for a moment.
The meat pie
Our Acadian meat pie is beef, pork, and chicken, hand-chopped after cooking, under a proper crust. The menu says it’s a bit like tourtière, “but just a bit,” which is the most diplomatic sentence on the page. In Acadian homes it has always been holiday food, the thing on the table after midnight Mass. Here it’s on the menu all year, because we see no reason to wait.
The bouilli
On 26 May 2019, eight months after the bistro opened, its kitchen won the grand prize at the Défi des Chefs, the Shediac Rotary Club’s chefs’ competition. The winning dish was a bouilli, the Acadian boiled dinner, made from a family recipe the way Séb’s grandmother made it, with heritage summer savoury from the family garden. A new kitchen could have tried something clever. It cooked what it knew, and that turned out to be the clever thing.
The fifteenth of August
The Quinze Août, 15 August, is Acadie’s national day, when the tricolour with the gold star comes out on every porch and the tintamarre takes the streets. The bistro marks it each year with specials and music. If you can be in Shediac for only one day of the summer, it’s a good one to choose.
Questions people ask
- Where can I eat Acadian food in Shediac?
- Le Moque-Tortue, at 402 rue Main, serves chicken fricot with summer savoury and an Acadian meat pie all year.
- What is fricot?
- An Acadian stew of chicken, potatoes, and vegetables, seasoned with summer savoury and often served with dumplings.
- What is summer savoury?
- A small, peppery herb, the signature seasoning of Acadian cooking.
- What happens on 15 August?
- It’s National Acadian Day. The bistro serves specials, with music.