“These are Colin’s tomatoes.”

Hunter Guindon is standing in front of his guests at The Table, a restaurant in New London, Prince Edward Island. The former church is full, every table occupied, the low murmur of conversation settling as he begins to speak. Diners have booked months in advance for a seven-course tasting menu that changes week to week, committing to an experience they won’t fully understand until they sit down.

When Hunter introduces each course, he starts with the people: Colin, who grew the tomatoes. Krista, whose peppers were fermented for the dressing. Merrill, who brought in the halibut that afternoon. In this room, the food arrives threaded with names, with places, with stories.

“It’s not only the quality of the ingredients, but the relationship you have to the people that produce the food,” Hunter says.

“You can tell how much they care in the same way that I’m super proud of whatever dish I put together. Just to see them hyped up about what they grew. I'm like, ‘Oh, hell yeah. I can’t wait to go back to the restaurant tonight and tell people how excited Colin was about these tomatoes he grew.'

Food is all about that and has always been about that.”

Hunter's relationship with food began early. Cooking appealed to him not just for the creativity, but for the way it engaged everything at once — smell, taste, sound, touch, sight — all working together in real time. At 17, he moved from Ontario to Prince Edward Island to attend culinary school and fell in love with the island.

In early 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Hunter was hired as the Executive Chef for The Table. At the time, The Table — which is located in a rural community inside a former church — served dinner family-style, with guests seated at one long communal table.

"The pandemic happened before we opened for the season, and that obviously wasn't going to fly," Hunter says. "So we decided to kind of break the table into one of many tables. People really enjoyed that, actually. It kind of brought a whole new type of clientele out to us.”

Without family-style dining, the format shifted, and Hunter was able to try something he'd been thinking about for years.

“It was kind of always a dream of mine to do a super, super hyper-local tasting menu that changed every week.”

As a young chef working in larger restaurants, he always found it disingenuous that at the bottom of their menu it said: 'We use as much local as possible.'

It bothered him — he knew what was in the fridges and it certainly wasn't very local.

“What does that even mean?” he remembers thinking. “We use as much local as is convenient for us to use; we don’t use as much as possible.”

The phrase stuck with him: How much local food was actually possible in Canada?

That question has shaped everything he has built at The Table over the past six years.

In 2026, the restaurant entered another chapter. The original owner retired and sold The Table to Hunter, who now carries it forward as both Executive Chef and owner. The philosophy he helped shape — a weekly tasting menu built entirely from Canadian ingredients — remains unchanged.

“This is literally what Canada tastes like,” Hunter says. “Every single thing you’re going to eat is grown on this land."

That means none of the typical building blocks of flavour: no lemons, no vanilla, no chocolate, no cinnamon and no black pepper.

The team builds their menu backwards. They first gather the freshest ingredients and then decide what to make with them. Sometimes someone will knock on their door with a bushel of something they've grown, and Hunter is always thrilled with the challenge of incorporating a new ingredient into his menu.

One memorable addition came from Rick.

Rick first walked into the restaurant with three peaches in his hands, casually mentioning he had “a few peach trees” at his cottage up the road in French River. Hunter told him to bring whatever he had.

For the next two weeks, Rick arrived daily with flats and flats of fruit. It turned out he didn’t have a few trees — he had 60. He had even flown a specialist in from Georgia to teach him how to plant and prune them properly. Each peach arrives wrapped individually in a paper towel, carefully nestled into beer flats. “You can just tell he gives a shit about those peaches,” Hunter says.

When it's peach season, Rick's fruit appears in multiple courses. And at the end of the season, Hunter preserves them so he has a splash of summer to add to the menu when the restaurant reopens in May.

Laid out across a butcher-block table in the kitchen, these loved ingredients become the framework for a seven-course meal that will exist for one week — and never again in quite the same way.

“We’ve changed the menu top to bottom every week. And in those six years, we’ve never repeated a dish,” he says. "Which is kind of all a part of my dream — to just constantly create new stuff. By the time I’ve cooked those seven dishes for five nights, I’m bored with them, and I don’t ever want to cook these things again. Let’s cook something new.”

What arrives on the plate is fleeting. What remains is the connection.

Below, Hunter takes us through some recent dishes at The Table — a journey across Prince Edward Island told through the hands that grew, raised, and harvested each ingredient.

The Table is open from mid-May to late September. Reservations are necessary and should be made as early as possible, as tables fill up quickly.