Nibbler's Chip Truck

Guest Post: Ruth & Ian

Nibblers Chip Truck in Spanish, Ontario, is part way along the north shore of Georgian Bay, on the Trans Canada Highway between Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie. We stopped there on a rainy summer weekday during a mini road trip from southern Ontario to the Thunder Bay area.

The first good omen was the break in the rain that occurred just as we pulled up. We were also attracted by the petunias surrounding the road sign and the lighthouse rising up out of the chip truck roof. The clincher was the information that fresh pickerel was on the menu (the sign said “walleye”, but that must have been to attract tourists).

The attendant was ready and waiting to serve us; it was only the rain and not Spanish’s resident population or popularity as a tourist stop that had been keeping the crowds away because several other people pulled up as we were munching scrumptious battered and fried strips of pickerel at a picnic table. Among the others were a francophone couple from Quebec (we noted the latter distinction because there was lots evidence of the francophone community in the mid-north of Ontario) and a couple from Tennessee (although he had an appropriate drawl, she had retained an English accent that was surprising, especially when he identified that their relationship and life in the southern USA had lasted 20 years so far with “more to come”, he hoped).

The pickerel was wonderful, light, moist and flaky.

The chips weighed down the cardboard box; they were heavy with oil, hard to separate from one another and attractive for eating only in the interests of this review and because we were hungry.

Two pickerel dinners cost $17.80. As we dumped the chips in the trash can, we felt the fish, the decoration of the truck and surroundings, the company and the break in the rain were well worth the price.