Images of mermaids, I must admit, came to mind when I heard about Café Nymphe in St. Lunaire-Griquet near the tip of northwestern Newfoundland.
Magellan may have been hoping for even more, especially since the café is housed in a building called The Dark Tickle Company…
The Café’s owners get it. Here’s what they say on their Facebook page:
Our café has its name from Granchain’s French naval frigate La Nymphe! Not the reason you thought hey?
The place tickled us magenta with its shop full of their own homemade jams, sauces, tea, coffee, vinegars, salad dressings, drinks and chocolates (all incorporating local wild berries), and historically themed bistro (lunch was ”some good”), which houses the Granchain Exhibit.
Magellan and I arrived on a Monday morning soon after the café opened. We had a hard time choosing from the menu of homemade soups, sandwiches, entrées and the daily special. While waiting for our lunch to be readied, we wandered around the exhibit.
La Nymphe, the first naval vessel to enter St. Lunaire Bay, arrived on July 31, 1784, captained by the French nobleman, Guillaume Liberge de Granchain. He was quite the guy.
At the age of 14, his parents sent him to Giardes Marines. While bad luck made the talented young man a prisoner of war in Cornwall, England, it was there that he learned to speak English. He was part of the 6,000-man French army who fought at Yorktown in the American War of Independence.
When the Treaty of Versailles (1783) ended the American War of Independence, he was sent to Newfoundland, his main mission to reestablish French fishing rights on the French shore by negotiating with Newfoundland’s Governor, John Campbell. He was successful. They worked out an agreement to repatriate the French fishermen without severely inconveniencing the British fishermen who fished there. His second mission was to verify the hydrographic measurements taken by Cook and Lane in 1766 for an upcoming book.
La Nymphe and its crew stayed up here in Newfoundland for more than two weeks that summer. A nearby island bears the captain’s name, Granchain Island, and he named a few local bays after his wife and daughters.
Moving ahead a few centuries, in 1919, Kier’s grandfather set up a general store to supply groceries, dry goods, fishing supplies, building materials and gas, naming it after himself, Ford Elms Limited.
In 1973 when Ford decided to retire, he asked his daughter Gwen and her husband Steve if they were interested in taking over the store. They were. With their son Keir, then only four months old, they left Toronto for St. Lunaire-Griquet.
“Around 1990 a couple of years prior to the moratorium (the cod moratorium), my parents went out looking for product to stock our little craft store in the back of our old general store, but it wasn’t available. So, they started making it themselves,” Kier explained to us in an email.
After the cod moratorium of 1992, Kier’s parents discontinued the merchant part of the business and concentrated on producing and selling products made from wild berries.
With the discovery of L’Anse aux Meadows (a UNESCO world heritage site with the remnants of a 1,000-plus year-old Viking village just fifteen minutes north of St. Lunaire-Griquet) and the opening of a tourist centre onsite in 1968, more tourists began arriving to the Great Northern Peninsula.
In 2007, Keir and his wife Stacey returned home from Oregon to help his parents with the store. They have been wildly successful.

It was the two of them who added the Granchain Exhibit. “It was a collaboration between a group here, The Petit Nord Nature and Heritage Society, and one in Normandy. With the exception of the artifacts, which are of course local, the vast majority of the charts, displays, etc were done in France. Mainly Paris,” Keir told us.
The exhibit itself existed since 2003, but it bounced around a few different places until it was eventually put in storage for a few years. In 2009 we purposely renovated our upstairs to give the exhibit a home as we felt it was an awful shame for it to disappear. We had a smaller café on our main floor called “The Berry Patch” since ’91 or so. Both were going OK but could have been better. We decided to merge the two as a way for one to help the other…I think that was around 2016. Worked out OK!
Dark Tickle now manufacturers more than 150 products—most made from wild berries native to Newfoundland picked by hand and processed without additives. You can peek through the windows to see the wild berries being made into delicious products and follow the boardwalk at the back of the building to learn more about the different berries: bakeapple (cloudberry), partridgeberry (lingonberry), crowberry, squashberry, rhubarb and wild blueberry.


And their homemade wild-berry ice cream! Served in a fish-shaped cone called the Sculpin (named after a local fish), their ice cream, made in conjunction with a local dairy, is “some good.”

So good that in 2021, Dark Tickle signed an agreement to place its ice cream— bakeapple, partridgeberry and blueberry—in Sobeys and Foodland stores across Newfoundland. (And Sobeys honoured them two years later with the Local Innovation Award for Newfoundland and Labrador.)

Now, about the name “Dark Tickle.” It was Kier’s parents who gave the craft store in the back of Ford Ellms the name, the Dark Tickle Shoppe. A tickle, in Newfoundland, is a narrow salt-water strait. As Keir and Stacey have explained, “In our case it is ‘dark’ as it is surrounded by high hills.”
Let’s give the last word to Margaret Atwood from her novella, The Penelopiad:
Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and free
Whether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a tree
Or rolled in the arms of some nymph of the sea
Which is where we would all like to be, man!
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In addition to the café, open 11-8 daly, this family company has one of Newfoundland’s leading art and gift boutiques—and you can shop online. A member of the Économusée / Artisans At Work Atlantic network, they also partner with several Newfoundland businesses to produce wild berry soaps and bath bombs. Dark Tickle Expeditions and Northland Discovery Tours offer opportunities to see icebergs, whales, dolphins and seabirds. In 2020, Dark Tickle Company received the Outstanding Exporter award, which recognizes an individual, organization or company for exporting achievement of craft or giftware outside Atlantic Canada. Steve, Gwen, Kier and Stacey Knudsen—entrepreneurs in action!
Checkout The Dark Title Company on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube.
Bossé, Alain. “Doin’ it all in Northern Newfoundland. Saltscapes.
Neill, Richard. ”What’s in a Name?” The Newfoundland Quarterly, Memorial University: Volume 097, no. 1, Spring 2004.
Wheeler, Chérie. “The scoop of the summer: This fan-favourite N.L. ice cream is now available in grocery stores.” CBC. June 20, 2021.
6 Responses
“Dark Tickle” is just an awesome name and there ice cream cone looks totally delightful, wish I had some right now.
Quite the story and of course can only be from “The Rock”
Awesome.
Lovely people, too.
Fabulous information Kier
I am coming to visit this year. 2025. Looking forward to connecting with my Norwegian cousins. FYI My mother, sister brother and I attended your parents wedding at St George’s Golf club in Toronto. I was 13yrs old and fondly remember it all. Especially how beautiful your parents looked together ❤️
Gwenneth Eve Knudsen
I was named after my aunt Gwen and my Aunt Eve who was your great aunt.
You’ll be impressed with this place and the people Gwenneth!
What a lovely story and such an inviting little restaurant/shop. These are the treasures that we find in our travels from time to time – happy accidents I called them.
Thank you for sharing.
Yes! Good food, treats to take home, a bit of history and as always in Newfoundland, a friendly wit about the place.