Start from 30 curated places around Saint John, CA, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Italian by Night
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.
East Coast Bistro
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.
Trails & outdoors
Irving Nature Park
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.
Rockwood Park
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.
Things to do
New Brunswick Museum
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.
Imperial Theatre
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.
Landmarks & sights
Saint John City Market
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.
Reversing Falls Rapids
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.