FYI. The Red Shoe Pub is supposed to be great. We didn't go because it is about 20 to 30 mins from Cabot. So if you have a DD you can do it. While at Cabot I don't believe that it's worth it. Cabot has amazing food. i guess if you want the music go to Red Shoe Pub. Cabot might have someone playing there.
The Red Shoe is great. I hear Ben's new pub at Cabot is pretty good too. But the Red Shoe is legendary. Here's a review by Bill Spurr of the Halifax Chronicle Herald from a couple of years ago that I posted here at the time but which I think bears repeating:
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If you can’t enjoy yourself at the Red Shoe Pub, you might as well just stay home.
I thought I was in a commercial for Cape Breton tourism when we stopped in on Sunday at the Mabou pub, owned by the Rankin sisters. The 100-seat pub was packed and people were lined up out the door and down the steps for the weekly ceilidh, and a fiddler, piano player and a guy playing the spoons had the whole place clapping and cheering.
When we got a seat at the bar while we waited for a table, a young woman stood up and started step-dancing next to the piano. She got a big round of applause, and when she sat down I asked her how often she worked here, expecting her to tell me she was Mary Kate Morrison from Orangedale, or something like that. Turns out she was from Quebec and was waiting for a table, like us.
Customers spontaneously getting up to step dance! That’s how much fun the Red Shoe is. It’s a grand time, as they say.
The Red Shoe has a lot of character, and one of the people in our party speculated that three older guys at the next table, drinking Oland’s from the bottle and making observations, had been placed there to add local flavour for the tourists, but he was just kidding.
Besides, there’s plenty of colour here. The old hardwood floor is scuffed from people tapping their feet, black and white photos of local scenes decorate the walls, along with a long sign from Beaton’s clothing store, one of the building’s previous incarnations.
While we waited for someone to leave, I had a chance to check out the food coming out of the kitchen, carried by busy waitresses all wearing red shoes. The fish and chips, wings and wide bowls of chowder looked especially good.
Three of us had just finished a very onerous day of work, and we split a pitcher of Propeller Pilsner, which was very fresh, very cold and very quickly gone. Our server, the charming Katelyn, is at the Red Shoe for her fifth summer and knows what she’s doing, so we followed her advice.
My appetizer was one of the specials, a fish cake made with haddock and halibut, and topped with a corn and black bean salsa. The salsa added a level of spice I don’t normally associate with fish, but the cake had a wonderfully crisp crust, and a side salad included tomatoes that couldn’t have been picked more than 24 hours previously. An excellent start.
My colleague Jayson was just as pleased with his Mabou seafood chowder, made with big chunks of seafood and potatoes, and was especially impressed with the biscuit that came with the chowder, which he placed on a plane with those made by his wife, which are apparently the best in the world.
The biscuits at the Red Shoe are made with chunks of chilled butter, and are flaky and delicious.
The chowder is also dotted with house-made leek oil, and when a kitchen goes to the lengths of making their own flavoured oils, you know care is being taken with your food.
Being of delicate appetite, I had a second appetizer for my main, the BBQ pork fries, sweet potato fries topped with slow-cooked pulled pork, cheddar curds and a little pickled coleslaw. Not complex, but delicious.
Katelyn’s recommendation of the thick cut pork chop was bang on. If this big piece of pork had been cooked 30 seconds less, it would have been underdone, but it was perfect, tender and full of flavour, made even better by a topping of whisky apple chutney.
She also recommend the chicken pot pie, which is sort of open-faced, made with herbed chicken and served in a flaky pastry bowl, with lots of gravy. Not exactly hot weather food, to my mind, but very good.
We ran out of time for dessert, so went back the next night, having been told the gingerbread was worth it. Fresh ginger is put through a juicer to intensify its flavour in this dish, which is served with ice cream and a rum butterscotch sauce, and it is certainly very gingery.
I liked a strawberry galette even better, but the fresh berries are coming to an end. On that second visit, we made, in retrospect, the unwise decision to have dessert, then a bunch of wings, then another dessert. I think the spoons player was a bad influence on me.
Over two nights at the Shoe, I spent about $100, but lots of that was in beer and rum. The most expensive thing on the menu is $18.
I was impressed that the Rankin sisters have insisted on such high-quality food, when their fame would have made it easy to just serve over-priced fish and chips to tourists. Raylene Rankin was having supper in the pub with her family on the night we were there, and went out of her way to strike up a conversation with a family from Ottawa.
As my Cape Breton mother-in-law would say, Raylene’s a "beautyfull" person. And the Red Shoe Pub is a "beautyfull" place to eat.
( bspurr@herald.ca)
Bill Spurr is a features writer at The Chronicle Herald.