It's a controversial dish that gets the seal of approval from many satisfied diners.
Seal meat - from the same snuggly-looking sea mammals that are a pet cause of animal activists - is quite the culinary delicacy north of the border, where it's served up seared and rare in fine restaurants, much like a loin of beef, The New York Times reports.
The "handful" of restaurants in Canada that serve seal have become unexpected tourist attractions, thanks to a European Union ban on imports of commercially caught Canadian seal products, the Times article states.
While seal-hunting is the subject of heated protests in Europe, Canada's governor general, Michaelle Jean, effectively thumbed her nose at the European ban just days after it passed, by snacking on a piece of raw seal heart during a visit to one of Canada's Inuit communities.
In Montreal, chef Andree Garcia told the paper she has noticed an uptick in tourists from France who have come to her restaurant to sample the seal dishes.
"The French are against seal hunting," Garcia said, "but when they come here, they want to eat it."
Canada allows two seal hunts each year, according to The Times - a small one by Inuits, who have been subsisting on the meat for centuries, and the larger Gulf of St. Lawrence hunt, largely fueled by the fur trade.
"If [restaurants] are selling meat, they're promoting the commercial seal hunt," Rebecca Aldworth, director of the Humane Society in Canada, told the paper. "The restaurants aren't the story here. The seal hunt is the story."
Nevertheless, as long as diners show a taste for seal, chefs seem determined to find creative ways to serve it up, from smoked seal to seal steak to seal pepperoni.
"I would say 90 percent of the people like [seal] very much," Denis Painchaud, chef at Auberge Chez Denis à François in Hâvre-Aubert, Quebec, told the Times. "It's very, very seldom when someone says, 'I don't like it at all.'"
