Todd Perrin (Mallard Cottage): cooking Newfoundland
Todd Perrin's first restaurant closed because the building fell down. Not a fire. Not a lease dispute. The wall gave out. He and his wife looked at the repair bill, looked at each other, and made a decision most chefs wouldn't: he became a stay-at-home dad.
Three years later, their daughter started school. Perrin opened a small bed-and-breakfast in St. John's called the Chef's Inn, where he hosted private dining events for guests. It was modest. It was enough. And then Top Chef Canada called.
A competition that sent him home
Perrin competed on the first season of Top Chef Canada in 2011, finishing in the top eight. The show is famous for launching chefs into Toronto and Vancouver opportunities. Perrin went the other direction. He came back to Newfoundland with a renewed sense of purpose.
What he did next wasn't a restaurant opening. It was a restoration project.
In 2011, Perrin, his wife Kim Doyle, and sommelier Stephen Lee bought Mallard Cottage in Quidi Vidi Village, a five-minute drive from downtown St. John's. The building dates to somewhere between 1820 and 1840, built by an Irish-immigrant family of fisherfolk and farmers named Mallard. It's a National Historic Site. One of the oldest wooden buildings in North America. When Perrin bought it, it had been an antique shop for 26 years.
It took two years to restore the cottage. Heritage specialists from Sweet Lumber Enterprises and the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador guided the work. The original hipped roof and central chimney stayed. Rustic wooden floorboards stayed. A rear extension added 30 square metres of dining space. The team won the Southcott Award in 2013 for their restoration work, the same year the restaurant opened its doors in November.
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
The chalkboard menu
Mallard Cottage never printed a menu. Every day, Perrin wrote the offerings on a chalkboard in the dining room. What was available depended on what came in from the land and the sea that morning.
This wasn't a gimmick. It was the logical outcome of cooking in Newfoundland. The province has a culinary advantage that exists nowhere else in Canada: restaurants can buy wild game and seafood directly from local hunters and fisherfolk. No middleman. No distributor. Perrin could serve moose, caribou, partridge, and rabbit sourced from the people who harvested them. Cod, halibut, snow crab, whelks, and turbot came from local boats. Foraged ingredients rounded out the plates: beach peas, Scotch lovage, partridge berries, cloudberries, chanterelles, morels.
And then there was seal.
On Top Chef Canada, Perrin had tried to convince the judges that seal was a legitimate ingredient. It didn't land on television. At Mallard Cottage, it landed perfectly. Seal became part of the restaurant's identity: a quiet insistence that Newfoundland food, all of it, deserved a place at the table.
Recognition that followed the work
The restaurant world noticed quickly. In its first full year, enRoute magazine named Mallard Cottage the fifth best new restaurant in Canada for 2014. Canada's 100 Best Restaurants ranked it No. 38 in 2015, then No. 22 in 2018. For a 50-seat restaurant in a fishing village on the eastern edge of the continent, these weren't just rankings. They were proof that the food didn't need to leave Newfoundland to matter.
Perrin expanded. Around 2019, he opened Water West Kitchen and Meats in a former pharmacy building on Water Street in St. John's. Twenty seats, a coffee bar, a takeaway deli. A different format, but the same commitment to local product.
He returned to television too, this time on the other side. As a judge on Food Network Canada's Wall of Chefs in 2020, Perrin watched home cooks compete and found himself struck by how prepared they were. He'd been nervous as a professional on Top Chef. These amateurs showed up ready.
What Mallard Cottage showed
Perrin built Mallard Cottage on three ideas that other independent operators keep circling back to.
First, place is a menu. The daily chalkboard wasn't a constraint. It was the concept. Cooking from what's available, where you are, when you're there. That approach produced a restaurant with no two identical days and a following of regulars who came specifically because they didn't know what they'd get.
Second, heritage is a competitive advantage. The 200-year-old building wasn't just atmosphere. It was a story that no new-build restaurant could replicate. Every profile, every review, every award mention led with the cottage. The building did marketing work that no ad budget could match.
Third, conviction travels farther than trend-chasing. Perrin cooked seal when it was controversial and foraged ingredients before foraging became fashionable. He stayed in Newfoundland when the industry rewarded leaving. The specificity of his commitment became the thing people traveled to experience.
Mallard Cottage's ownership changed hands in 2024, when Quebec entrepreneur Blair McIntosh took over the restaurant. But the decade Perrin spent building it left a mark on Canada's food culture: proof that a restaurant rooted in one place, cooking that place's ingredients, serving them in a building that predates Confederation, could stand alongside the best in the country.
Sources: Foodservice & Hospitality Magazine, Canada's 100 Best, Newfoundland Herald, Wolf in the Fog, CBC News.
