Holly & Jason Cullihall (Buoy & Arrow): building a restaurant from the land up
Jason Cullihall grew up fishing lobster, crab, and halibut with his uncles and grandfather off the coast of Rocky Harbour, Newfoundland. Fishing, hunting, trapping, foraging, preserving: none of it was a hobby. It was how his family fed themselves, how they'd fed themselves for generations. When he and his wife Holly opened Buoy & Arrow in 2022, they didn't sit down to design a concept. They just cooked the food they knew.
What a menu looks like when it comes from the ground
Buoy & Arrow is one of the few accredited Indigenous restaurants in Newfoundland and Labrador. Mi'kmaw owned and operated, the 57-seat restaurant in the heart of Gros Morne National Park serves pulled bear sandwiches, moose specials, snow hare, scallops wrapped in bacon, lobster rolls, and desserts made with partridgeberry, a wild berry that grows in the bogs around the park. The menu changes with the seasons because it has to: the ingredients are whatever the land and sea are offering right now.
This isn't heritage cooking as a concept. It's a kitchen stocked by the same fishers, hunters, and farmers who supply the rest of the community, local sourcing as a working supply chain rather than a line on a menu. Holly describes the approach simply on their website: "Our menu is rooted in place, shaped by the land and sea, and inspired by the stories that connect them."
That sentence does more work than most restaurant mission statements.
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
Two paths to Harbour Drive
Holly grew up in rural Ontario. She's the one with the greenhouse, the recipe testing, the baking experiments. Jason's the one who can mill lumber, trap animals, and build things out of whatever's available, skills passed down through his family for generations. They met while Jason was working in Ontario. His east coast charm, as Holly puts it, won her over.
They got married aboard a catamaran in Norris Point, just down the coast from Rocky Harbour, then headed back to Ontario. For almost ten years, they ran a hobby farm: a trout pond, vegetable gardens, animals, a successful firewood business. Both of them studied business management and entrepreneurship. They weren't winging it. But Ontario wasn't where the pull was.
In 2019, they moved to Rocky Harbour. Three years later, Buoy & Arrow opened.
Building a destination, not just a restaurant
What Holly and Jason built is more than a 57-seat dining room. Buoy & Arrow includes six renovated suites and a property called Drift Ashore House, all on Harbour Drive with ocean views. The idea is straightforward: give visitors to Gros Morne a place to sleep and a place to eat that actually reflects where they are.
That "where they are" part matters. Rocky Harbour sits inside a UNESCO World Heritage Site, surrounded by some of the most striking geology on the planet. Visitors come for the hiking, the boat tours, the tablelands. But food has historically been an afterthought in outdoor tourism towns. Holly and Jason saw the gap: travellers who spend all day outside come back hungry, and they deserve better than generic pub fare.
The restaurant is open daily, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., year-round. No reservations, first-come first-served. They accommodate tour groups with custom menus. The patio is licensed in summer, facing west for sunset. They run live music nights on Mondays and Wednesdays, cocktail nights on Fridays. It's a small-town restaurant that operates with real ambition.
Recognition that actually means something
In March 2025, Buoy & Arrow received the Culinary & Agritourism Award of Excellence at the Hospitality Newfoundland and Labrador Conference. It was the first time the award had ever been given in the province, part of a national series sponsored by the Culinary Tourism Alliance. Nicole Brown, the CTA's VP of Operations and Partnerships, said it directly: "They are not only feeding people, they are telling stories of land, water, community, and culture."
The restaurant also holds "The Original Original" accreditation from the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada, a designation that requires at least 51% Indigenous ownership and a market-ready visitor experience. Holly and Jason are active members of NLITA, Hospitality Newfoundland and Labrador, and Go Western Newfoundland. They're not just running a business. They're building the province's culinary tourism infrastructure, one partnership at a time.
What other independents can take from this
There's a pattern worth noticing here. Holly and Jason didn't chase a trend or import a concept. They started with what was already in front of them: Jason's lifelong relationship with the land and water, Holly's food knowledge, a town full of visitors looking for something real, and a set of business skills they'd built before the restaurant ever opened.
Zero-waste practices, partnerships with local suppliers, seasonal menus that change because the ingredients change: these aren't branding decisions. They're the natural outcome of cooking in a place where supply chains are short and the weather decides what's available.
The Cullihalls also made a strategic choice that's easy to overlook. By combining accommodations with dining, they built a business that captures more of the visitor's trip. A guest who stays in a Buoy & Arrow suite eats at the restaurant. A guest who eats at the restaurant learns about the suites. In a town that runs on tourism season, that kind of vertical integration is what keeps the lights on through winter.
Three years from opening to winning the province's first culinary tourism award. Not bad for a couple who moved back home with a firewood business behind them and a freezer full of ideas ahead.
Sources: Buoy & Arrow, Culinary Tourism Alliance, NLITA, Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada.
