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‍pen three days a week from May to December, Chef Bryan Picard’s restaurant is powered by one electric stove with four burners, four employees including Picard, and a kitchen sink in place of a dishwasher.

If you’re lucky enough to have snagged a reservation at Bite House—their 2020 bookings filled up in less than one minute—and if you’ve been able to make the pilgrimage from whichever corner of the world you started in, you might have the chance to step into a little white farmhouse with 12 to 15 other diners. And if you’re lucky enough to make it that far, it’s likely you might just have the best meal of your life. 

The menu of nine courses is always dictated by the seasons and the availability of local produce (like, drive-to-the-neighbour’s-place-local). Some of the ingredients that you’ll see will have been harvested just outside, that same day, from Picard’s garden. He and his partner, Marie Isabelle Whitty Lampron, live and work here, with the latter operating a shop and designing clothing for her slow fashion label Whitty on this multipurpose property too.

It seems impossible, but somehow everything falls together beautifully. It’s less like eating in a restaurant, and more like being invited to what may be the best dinner party of all time: spectacular food, gracious hosts, killer music (“a mix of soul, blues, funk and old-time”), picture-perfect setting, and an unmatched vibe. What more could you ask for?

Made on the property, and in friends’ backyards, Picard’s food is simple, unfussed, and truly remarkable.

Beautiful dishes like gooseberry sorbet, acadia wheat honey cake, bay leaf syrup and hazelnuts, plated on a handmade piece that is gorgeous in its own right by Halifax-based Melody Hillman Ceramics, can be seen gracing his Instagram feed along with sourdough boules with absolutely flawless crumbs (that cross-section!), bird’s-eye view shots of foraged chanterelles, and countless other local treasures. 

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Bite House taps into something so special; it’s a breathtaking, humbling reminder of not just what restaurants can be, but what a community-focused approach to food and hospitality can look like.

Picard could expand the dining room; knock down a wall or build an even larger structure, serve an adjusted menu that could accommodate the huge, well-deserved support for this little space, but that isn’t what Bite House is all about. There doesn’t need to be more. It is already perfect—everything is already here.