Trip to Banff: Day 7 (or, Calgary and its culinary experience)

[This is written after my trip, from my notes and memory. You'll soon see the reason for this title, as I ate at six eating establishments and visited or mention a few more.]

This is Friday. These pictures go with my travels for the day.

Having decided to spend the day exploring Calgary, after waking up in Canmore I spent a little while trying to find an internet cafe. After all, I wanted to look up to see what the chowhounds said about Calgary restaurants to know where I should eat that evening. My main goal was to eat traditional regional cuisine, which involve a heavy emphasis on meat (since Alberta is large in the ranching/bovine industry). I also needed the internet to decide where to go in the evening, i.e., what events were going on in Calgary. A gas station attendant gave me very detailed directions to an internet cafe near a particular video store. But I found three video stores in that area, and never found an internet cafe. This would turn out to be portentous.

(A digression: There seem to be very little variation in gas prices in Canada: seemingly at most two cents per liter difference at any gas stations, generally regardless of where the gas station is (how remote) and whether the station is full or self service. Must be a quite regulated product.)

Having given up, I decided to grab an early lunch at the other restaurant I had remembered hearing chowhounders heartily recommend in Canmore: Valbella Meats. It turned out to be a meat shop, mostly selling uncooked meats and sausages and so on (including, like almost every counter-ordering food place, an assortment of pot pies). I got a butcher's selection (an assortment of meats) sandwich, which was excellent because the meats were great. (This produced a sharp contrast with the deli sandwich I had yesterday.)

Upon entering Calgary, the first place I stopped was Canada Olympic Park, the site of the 1988 Winter Olympics. During the summer it's used for luge or skeleton practice, mountain bike courses, indoor skating practice, and miniature golf. I looked around the base camp level, drove around the base, and took a few pictures, but decided it frankly wasn't very exciting and certainly not exciting enough to pay for a lift ticket to go to the top and look around.

Heading to downtown Calgary, I parked by the outskirts of central downtown and started walking downtown, stopping by every hotel I saw to ask its availability and price for the evening. I wasn't going to caught last minute like the previous night! But the prices I kept getting were pretty steep: $120+ CAN for a single night.

In any case, when I hit the center of downtown (at just before 2pm), I realized I was hungry, looked around, and hopped into the James Joyce Irish Pub. Had a Guinness (beef) Pie (yet another place that sells meat pies) which was quite good and hearty (and hot, temperature-wise -- it really kept its heat). Also had a pint of Guinness, forgetting that I actually don't really like Guinness. It's just too thick. The place as a whole had a nice pub-like atmosphere; I liked it.

After a brief excursion east to pick up some walking maps of Calgary, I followed some suggested tours. The main street in downtown is the Stephen's Avenue walk, a car-less promenade with wide sidewalks, a number of historical plaques, many many commercial establishments (yet managing to be non-gaudy), and relatively few homeless/beggars. I liked it.

I also liked the city layout. I know it's not uncommon, but numbering Streets and Avenues systematically from the city center along with annotations like SE or NE makes figuring out where places are much easier.

Like Portland, they have a tram that's free if you're staying within downtown.

Calgary is rightly called the Texas of Canada, at least in the sense that I could see many preparations for an upcoming famous rodeo/festival called the Calgary Stampede. And there were a number of stores selling western garb. And besides, much of this part of the province is heavy into livestock and oil.

Anyway, during my walking tour I stopped by the information center. They had a single coin-operated computer connected to the Web. I wanted to use it for a while to view restaurant reviews and hunt for an inexpensive hotel but it felt weird so I asked the information center where the nearest internet cafe or kinkos/computerized copy shop was. It turns out there isn't one in central downtown! They gave me directions to one at the edge of (the dense walkable part of) downtown; a short free tram ride later and I was there.

And it turned out this "internet cafe" was just a coffeehouse with, again, a single coin operated computer. And this one was in use, so back I headed to downtown, planning to swing by the information center again later and plop in a few coins. Indeed, I did later make it back and quickly found an inexpensive hotel (Comfort Inn) just a fifteen minute drive from downtown and with free internet.

Anyway, at some point during the day I wandered around and found a nice chinatown. More like the LA chinatown than SF or Oakland, it was full of wide streets and short buildings. Judging by the restaurants, they have a large Vietnamese population.

Another cool feature of Calgary is raised tunnels. Calgary has bridges 15 feet above the ground connecting buildings downtown together. (Hence they are called the +15 walkway.) The network is quite connected; one can travel to most buildings downtown via these pathways, which sometimes pass through shopping malls in the interior of buildings. The point of them is obvious: people don't have to go outside during Calgary's bitterly cold winters.

They have a cute small (man made) island park in the river just north of downtown (Prince's Island). I actually revisited this, as you'll discover later in this narrative.

Another feature of Calgary that probably exists because people can't go outside for most the year is Devonian Gardens. This is a massive indoor garden (supposedly the largest in north america) on the upper levels of a building downtown. Very pretty, very relaxing. I saw more than one couple posing for wedding photos there. And, as you can tell, I went a little overboard with macro mode on my camera, but some shots came out quite well and I'm happy.

After exploring all this downtown and going to the information desk and their coin operated internet connection and researching and booking my hotel, I checked in and used its internet connection to look up restaurant reviews and Calgary events and plan my activities for the evening and following day. (I flew out in the early evening the following day.)

Much reading on chowhound later, I had a list of four restaurants that I considered the best or most distinctive of Calgary's offerings: the River Cafe, an elaborate expensive four-star dining experience; Cilantro, a slightly off-beat restaurant everyone seems to like; the Divino Wine and Cheese Bistro, an unusual restaurant providing an eclectic selection of international offerings; Caesar's Steak House, supposedly the best restaurant that reflects the area's prominence in the meat industry. (Interestingly, both Divino and Cilantro are owned by the same parent, which also owns the Buffalo Mountain Lodge where I ate on Day 1. This fact probably deserves another blog post discussing how they can succeed in managing a number of top-notch restaurants while most places have quality decreases as they grow.) Due to my lack of decision making skills, I decided (hehe) to try the visiting the restaurants from the north to the south and to eat at the first in which I could get a table on this Friday night.

The furthest north was the River Cafe, a restaurant whose emphasis on local ingredients and rumored difficulty in getting a table reminded me of Chez Panisse. It turned out this restaurant was the only commercial building on the island of Prince's Park! What a wonderful setting and place to be. And, surprisingly, when I found the cafe I wasn't turned away by the maitre'd for lack of a reservation; rather, the restaurant was closed. Apparently the heavy rains that flooded highway one on day one of my trip also flooded the river and washed out the small access bridge upon which the cafe gets food supplies from the city, so it's been closed for the last week. Well, at least I tried, and at least it makes an interesting story.

The next further south restaurant was Caesar's, and they had seating available. I ordered the (medium) rib eye steak and it came with a number of addition items: a salad (mostly iceberg lettuce, tasted a bit old), french onion soup (also not very good), and some garlic toast (quite good, very garlicy and really like garlic bread, but toasted to give it some extra crunch). After the salad and the soup, I was worried how bad my meal would be. But then I remembered a chowhound's advice that said this place served the best steak, in particular rib eye, of the multitude of steakhouses in Calgary, but nothing else here was worth eating. So my hopes were still high.

And they were not to be disappointed. I'm usually not a steak fan, but this steak was excellently cooked, moist and slightly pink on the inside, and the idle amount of fat/marbling. (I usually don't notice marbling in meats, but this time I did and I could tell it was perfect.) The steak also came with some funky baked mashed potatoes, much like a mashed potato that had it been baked until it had a solid/crispy outside but still a soft interior. A very nice contrast of textures. (Incidentally, the steak was a perfect size given the rest of the items. This fact was dumb luck since I ordered the 300 gram one without any idea, because I couldn't remember the metric-to-english conversation ratios.)

So what did I do after dinner? I came prepared! In my hotel room earlier I noticed the Calgary Jazz Festival was still happening this weekend and I'd jotted down the schedule and locations of all the events tonight; there were a number of them. Although I could make it to an official concert in a performance hall, I decided I'd rather see the nightlife by attending less elaborate productions in bars/restaurants/jazz clubs.

My first post-destination dinner was a restaurant whose name I don't remember on the east edge of downtown. (Incidentally, getting between these restaurants and the musical venues later in the evening was easy. I had paid for parking in a lot near the River Cafe and the company that runs that lot seems to run the majority of lots all over downtown. So the ticket stub I got for paying for evening parking I just kept with me as I transferred from one lot owned by this company to another. Very convenient.) I was a little hesitant to enter because I wasn't expecting a restaurant; I was expecting a bar or music club to be a venue for the jazz festival. But the flirty hostess did her job and affirmed I was in the right place and had me seated at the bar near the artists.

The jazz was pretty good though not what I traditionally think of as jazz. It was a quartet that included a vocalist and a guitarist; a little more rocky than expected but melodies were definitely jazz as were the sultry vocals. But what I remember most about this experience was not the music but rather the excellent glass of Italian pinot grigio I got from the bartender. I wish I knew its name.

As I was walking around downtown figuring out where to go next, I passed Murrieta's. It wasn't on my list of jazz festival venues, but the place was happening. I could hear music pouring out the second floor balcony, and people overflowing the stairs heading up to the place. So I went in, ordered a drink out of guilt (vsop brandy), and listened to some good rock music with great guitar work. This was actually the best music of the three I heard this night.

After finishing my brandy, I went to the cozy bar/lounge in the Marriott Calgary to catch the tail end of a jazz festival performance. This crowd was small but the band was fun and energetic. Again, mostly out of guilt for a free show, I ordered a drink: a caesar (because I didn't know what it was). Turned out to tomato juice, tobasco sauce, worcester sauce, vodka (or rum, I forget), with a little apple and lime juice and a stalk of celery throwing in for mixing. Decent, with quite a kick from the hotness; the alcohol was untasteable.

The band finished its set after about twenty minutes and packed up (it was after midnight), so I finished my drink and headed back to my hotel. I'd seen enough and had enough of Calgary and Calgary's nightlife for one day.

Perhaps surprisingly, I never visited the Calgary Tower -Calgary's analogue to Seattle's Space Needle- (because it was overcast most of Friday (day 7) and Saturday (day 8)).

But, what struck me the most as I went to sleep tonight was that I actually had "done Calgary." Aside from the museum (which I'd see tomorrow) and possibility visiting more restaurants, I'm happy that I understand the whole of what Calgary is and what they have to offer. (On the other hand, I lived in New York City for two months and didn't quite reach this feeling there.)