Saint John, CA

A dim, narrow Princess Street room running scratch pasta and a long Italian-leaning wine list — the dressier of the two restaurants run by the same uptown group. It's the spot Saint John books for anniversaries and second-date dinners.

A cozy Germain Street bistro doing modern New Brunswick cooking built on Bay of Fundy seafood and Kennebecasis Valley farms. The room is small, the menu rotates weekly, and it's been a critical favourite uptown for years.

A Grannan Lane brick-walled basement room with an open kitchen, a tight cocktail list and small-plate cooking that leans seasonal and shareable. It's where uptown industry crowds head when they want a real dinner after a shift.

A waterfront gastropub on Market Square pouring local taps and turning out a serious seafood-leaning menu — chowder, mussels, fish and chips, lobster rolls in season. It's the easiest table to land downtown for a meal that's better than the location suggests.

A fish-market-and-restaurant inside the City Market with a glass case of whole Fundy fish up front and a small dining room behind it. The chowder, fish cakes and lobster roll are the locals' lunch pick when the market is open.

A Market Square mainstay running since the 1980s, with a wide brass-and-wood dining room and a menu built around Atlantic seafood — oysters, planked salmon, scallops, lobster. It's the safe-bet seafood dinner when a group needs one room that solves everyone.

A Canterbury Street room that runs an Indian-leaning menu by day and turns into one of the city's livelier bars at night. The butter chicken and lamb vindaloo carry the kitchen and the cocktail list is more ambitious than the storefront suggests.

An uptown Thai room with a long menu of curries, noodle bowls and stir-fries that lands closer to the heat scale most Maritime kitchens dodge. It's the dependable Thai dinner when you want something that isn't seafood or pasta.

A locally roasted coffee chain whose original cafe sits inside the City Market — a quick stop for a flat white or drip in the busiest room in town. The roastery has been running in Saint John since the late 1990s.

A 600-acre wooded peninsula on the West Side with seven looped trails covering bog, beach, forest and rocky coast — donated to the city by the Irving family and free to enter. Sheldon Point at the tip has the most exposed Bay of Fundy view in town.

One of the largest urban parks in Canada at 2,200 acres, just minutes from uptown, with 55 km of trails threading lakes and glacial outcrops. Lily Lake at the centre has a year-round pavilion that doubles as the trailhead for the easy loops.

A flat 4 km paved waterfront path painted bright red, running from Market Square along the harbour and under the harbour bridge to the Reversing Falls. It's how locals jog and how visitors actually see the working harbour on foot.

A west-side cove on the Bay of Fundy with a long crescent of sand at low tide and a wooded picnic ground above it. Sometimes warm enough to swim by August standards, mostly a place to walk the tide line and read the geology.

A small protected coastal park on the far West Side reached by a causeway, with short rocky-shore loops and Stonehammer Geopark interpretive panels on the Fundy geology. Quieter than Irving Nature Park and the better choice when you want a short walk close to the water.

A 30 km coastal parkway about an hour east of the city, climbing along the Bay of Fundy cliffs with constant lookouts, side trails to beaches and the suspension footbridge at Big Salmon River. The signature day trip from Saint John for the Fundy coast proper.

New Brunswick's provincial museum on Market Square, with halls covering Bay of Fundy marine life, the province's shipbuilding history and the Hall of Whales whose full skeleton hangs through three storeys. The oldest continuously operating museum in Canada.

A restored 1913 vaudeville house on King's Square with a gilded plaster proscenium, three balcony tiers and a year-round program of concerts, plays and Symphony New Brunswick. The building alone is worth the price of admission.

A seasonal village of repurposed shipping containers on the West Side waterfront housing about 30 small local makers, food vendors and a craft-beer bar. It runs through the warmer months and is the city's most visible homegrown small-business project.

The former Carnegie library on Peel Plaza converted into a multi-gallery arts centre showing rotating regional and national work, plus artist studios upstairs. Free admission and an easy 45-minute stop on a heritage walk through uptown.

A Princess Street brewpub running its own taps in a brick basement room — the oldest craft brewpub in the city and the easiest pint-and-food stop in the heritage core. The kitchen does honest pub food and the rotating cask is the curiosity worth ordering.

A North End taproom for one of the province's most respected hop-forward brewers — known for hazy IPAs and limited barrel-aged releases. Smaller and more taproom-y than Big Tide, and the better stop when you want serious beer over food.

North America's first UNESCO Global Geopark, covering more than 60 sites across greater Saint John where over a billion years of geological history are exposed — Reversing Falls, Irving Nature Park and the Fundy coast all sit inside it. The visitor centre at the Reversing Falls runs as the orientation hub.

The oldest continuously operating farmers' market in Canada, in a sloped 1876 hall whose ceiling was built upside-down like a ship's hull by local shipwrights. Two long rows of butchers, fishmongers, bakers, dulse vendors and lunch counters — the social heart of uptown.

The stretch of the Saint John River at the harbour where the world's highest tides force the river to flow backwards twice a day. The viewing platforms at Skywalk Saint John and the Fallsview Park lookout time-lapse the slack-tide reversal on a roughly six-hour cycle.

The 20-block uptown grid of brick and stone storefronts rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1877, now Canada's largest preserved Victorian streetscape. Princess, Germain, Prince William and Canterbury are the spine — independent shops, galleries and restaurants in row after row of cast-iron and brick facades.

A two-block green square in the heart of uptown holding the graves of the United Empire Loyalists who founded Saint John in 1783, with markers worn into illegibility by 240 years of salt air. The fountain and benches make it a quiet uptown stop between the City Market and King's Square.

The original 1783 town square laid out in a Union Jack pattern of diagonal paths, with a two-storey bandstand at the centre and the Carnegie-built free library on its edge. It's the social pivot of uptown between the City Market and King Street.

A stone gun tower on the West Side built during the War of 1812 and used through the Second World War as a fire-control post for the harbour. Now a Parks Canada site with restored powder magazine, period guides and the best harbour-side panorama in the city.

A cast-iron triple-headed gas lamp at the foot of Prince William Street, first lit in 1848 to guide ships into the harbour and still standing in its original spot. A small but unmistakable piece of working maritime history and the photogenic anchor of the lower uptown.

A 1817 Georgian wooden house at the top of Union Street, lived in by the same Loyalist family for almost 150 years and now a museum kept close to original. One of the very few buildings to survive the 1877 fire and the most intact pre-fire interior in the city.