It’s not often that me drinking beer is good for the world. Most of the time, I’m not even sure if I’m drinking to forget or forgetting to drink.
It’s an infinitesimally small step, but every time I sip a Fire Bloom lager from Calgary’s Best of Kin brewery, a portion of the sale goes to help regenerate wildfire-ravaged landscapes like the recent mountains around Jasper. Indeed, flowers from colourful fireweed that emerges from wildfire ashes were used to produce the honey that goes into the seasonal Fire Bloom beer.
Of course, this unique lager tastes pretty damn good, too. We enjoyed a couple of pints, along with a Big Hat hazy IPA, at Best of Kin’s taproom in the close-to-downtown neighbourhood of Sunalta.
It’s liquid honey, not fiery, going down the hatch
Unbeknownst to us, the Best of Kin owners (featuring brothers Ryan and Collin), staff and friends were celebrating the brewery’s second birthday when we visited. It was also happy hour, so a couple of tasty snacks—triple-cooked Kennebec fries and spicy parmesan popcorn—didn’t add much to our already reasonable tab.
The Fire Bloom pairs nicely with triple-cooked Kennebec potato fries
In all, a rather festive way to help the planet.
Best of Kin 1059 14 Street SW, Calgary Tuesday to Sunday, most days 11:30 am to 11 pm 825-413-4233
There’s nothing like sharing Happy Hour appetizers
There’s one thing residents and visitors can agree on: Canmore is seriously overcrowded.
For a mountain town of 17,000 residents, that means traffic jams, wandering pedestrians, bewildering parking fees and lineups pretty much any time of day, any season of the year. God forbid if you head into town on a sunny summer weekend.
The good news is there’s a commensurate number of first-class, diversified places to eat and drink. Indeed, I would argue Canmore boasts more such places, on a per capita basis, than any town or city in Alberta.
Of course, most of these establishments charge mountain tourist prices for their fare. But there’s one way residents and visitors can snag a deal: Happy hour.
Big deal, you might argue. Happy hours are a dime a dozen in almost every municipality, big and small, in North America.
But here’s where Canmore is different. Given the large number of eateries, there’s a lot of competition amongst them, especially during the dead, late afternoon dining hours of happy hour. And that’s when a growing number of Canmorites (Canmorons?) venture out for a bargain burger and pint or pizza.
Here are a few to get you started.
Bridgette Bar is a mini, chef-driven chain (also Calgary and Toronto locations) that seems to have jumpstarted the recent interest in Canmore’s happy-hour scene. On a recent mid-week afternoon, more than 50 patrons were enjoying the fine subsidized fares. Its so-called matinee happy hour starts at 2 pm and offers generous deals of half off on all beverages and excellent pizzas, including wild mushroom ($13) and fennel salami ($12).
Fabulous chicken pizza at Bridgette’s happy hour
The nearby Mineshaft Tavern is a unique setup, sharing a kitchen with an attached seniors’ living facility in the newish, rundle-rock community of Spring Creek. When I saw residents, in comfy chairs, sipping happy hour glasses of red wine, I wondered where do I sign up for my own sunset years?
Mineshaft Tavern offers good pub fare, including a diversity of happy hour deals: $6 drinks 2-6 pm and daily specials such as $3 tacos Monday and $13 burger and fries Thursday. Plus there’s a daily $10 soup and sandwich deal.
An immense, delicious happy-hour burger and fries at Mineshaft Tavern
Elsewhere Crazy Weed and its sophisticated, casual menu offers 50% off “doughs” daily from 2-5 pm. Tavern 1883 boasts Canmore’s biggest “mountain” hour, with 40% off all food and drink from 2-5 pm every day. Finally, The Georgetown Inn has weekly pub specials, highlighted by fish and chips deals ($15 for one piece of cod) every Tuesday.
Mineshaft Tavern 808 Spring Creek Drive Daily 11:30 am-9 pm 403-678-2288
Bridgette Bar Canmore 1030 Spring Creek Drive Happy Hour 2-5 pm Text 403-493-5643 “We don’t have a telephone”
After railing last week about unhealthy restaurant breakfasts, I wondered what food and drink “vices” would be the toughest for me to give up.
Coffee jumpstarts my every morning
Number one, with a bullet, is coffee. A super-sized, super intense black coffee, produced with an Aeropress, jumpstarts my every morning, usually while I’m perusing the online news. Green tea would never be a replacement. And, it turns out, coffee is pretty good for you.
Number two is a tall can of beer, specifically a hoppy India Pale Ale, especially towards the end of a hot summer’s afternoon and most enjoyably shared on a patio with good friends. But I’ve discovered I can go several weeks without a brew. Just don’t see myself ever giving it up entirely.
The cure for whatever ales me
There’s nothing like a health scare to motivate a change in dietary habits. I used to polish off two or three bowls of ice cream in a single sitting, no problem. But when I was diagnosed with type two diabetes, I almost immediately dumped that binging habit. Haven’t had more than a few tastes of ice cream in the 20-plus years since. Same with desserts, chocolate, anything sweet. Don’t miss them.
Could you give up ice cream?
Enough about me. What would be the hardest “unhealthy” things for you to give up? A venti caramel macchiato? A pint of lager? A bottle of red? Two fingers of single malt? Dark chocolate? Eggs benedict?
Or artery-clogging eggs benedict?
Poutine? A Double Whopper? BBQ potato chips? THC gummies? Pepperoni sticks? A can of Pepsi? Peach pie with a scoop of vanilla? A stack of pancakes, dusted in icing sugar and swimming in butter and maple syrup?
Or a slab of mile-high pie?
Or maybe you have no intention of giving up these simple pleasures.
I recently had a prototypical restaurant breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast, mostly because of the $5 price. It was probably the first such breakfast I’d ordered in a couple of years.
The reason? This standard breakfast is typically a carbohydrate bomb, much more so if you throw some hash browns, potatoes or pancakes onto the groaning plate. This combination totals about 100 grams of carbs, which as a Type 2 diabetic would send my blood sugar levels surging to unhealthy levels. That’s how many carbs I consume in a week!
How about a gut-busting stack of pancakes?
But who cares, if you’re not diabetic? Here are some stats to consider. The carb-laden breakfast I described adds up to 1,200 calories (about half my daily needs), 80 grams of fat (95% of daily needs), 525 milligrams of cholesterol and 1,860 milligrams of salt. Believe me, not healthy numbers.
Yet when I peruse breakfast menus at reputable restaurants, the overwhelming emphasis is on platters of carb-heavy food. Banana cream pie French toast anyone?
Eggs benny with all the carbo trimmings
Admittedly, there are some recent concessions to healthier breakfasts, such as morning bowls that might remove toast from the equation. If you’re prepared to scour their menus, Denny’s offers a Fit Slam (450 calories and 59 grams of carbs, which could be further trimmed if the English muffin was eliminated), while IHOP provides an egg-white omelette totalling 480 calories and 26 grams of carbs. (My hack is to order a two-egg omelette with spinach, mushrooms and cheddar cheese—hold the toast, hold the hash browns—for only 200 calories and 4 grams of carbs.)
A much healthier breakfast bowl
But overall, healthy breakfasts seem like token concessions in a world still dominated by the carb-cal tag team. Don’t know why that is. Nostalgia? An occasional treat? Tastes so damn good?
Breakfast comfort food?
Methinks, there’s an unexploited niche for restaurants that want to go whole hog, so to speak, into healthier breakfasts. Until then, it’s carb bombs away… and curl up in the fetal position.
P.S. I haven’t forgotten you, burgers and fries. But I can only tackle one vice at a time.
Would you drive 15 minutes to wait in this breakfast line?
An enduring premise of Marathon Mouth is encouraging people to get off the highway and into the towns and cities that harbour the great independent eateries of western North America.
Yet I increasingly find myself not wanting to exit the highway and navigate to said eatery, especially if it’s upwards of a 10-minute drive to reach, and miles to go before I sleep. A second deterrent is busy roads leading to the destination café or bakery and lineups when I get there.
Often, it’s easier to grab a coffee and snack at a highway-side gas emporium or fast-food joint, despite all that’s wrong with such fare. To say nothing of travel companions unwilling to go a block out of their way to hit an In-N-Out Burger.
When I’m doing a long road trip west of Calgary to, say, the Okanagan or the coast, I never stop for sustenance in Canmore or Banff. It’s too close (about one hour) to the start of my journey and too much of a hassle to exit the Trans-Canada Highway and handle the tourist mobs.
Typically, I instead drive three hours to Golden, B.C. and take the 5-minute detour to pick up a coffee and warm muffin from Bacchus Cafe. Don’t know why, but I couldn’t be bothered on a recent trip.
Great muffins at Bacchus Cafe usually enough to get me off the highway in Golden, B.C.
But I did pull off where I always do, 90 minutes later in Revelstoke, to visit fabulous bakery La Baguette. But there was a line of about eight people just to buy baked goods. Not doing that.
Revelstoke’s La Baguette is generally well worth the wait
So, I headed over to nearby, farm-to-table Terravita Kitchen to meet a local friend for lunch. But by the time she cycled down, there was a line out the door.
A quiet moment at Terravita Kitchen, a welcome addition to the Revelstoke food scene
She confessed the summer tourist hordes are such that she rarely ventures downtown. So we ended up going to her house for a quiet, refreshing lunch.
After all the turmoil restaurants everywhere endured during the pandemic, I certainly don’t begrudge those who have done well in the ensuing tourism boom. But even residents are not all happy with the influx of visitors; see anti-tourism protests in Barcelona and elsewhere.
My typical response to beating restaurant crowds is to visit during off-peak hours. But that’s not always possible during longer road trips. Packing a lunch is an option but one that doesn’t help small, local cafes.
What’s your solution?
Bonus coverage on lineups
Here’s a highly entertaining New York Times story about how the “bazillion” options available when ordering a customized coffee at Starbucks is hurting business. To say nothing of creating long lines when the guy ahead of you is ordering six coffees, “each of which involves some combination of tall venti grande double-pump, one to four shots of espresso, half-caf, oat milk, nonfat milk, soy milk, milk milk, whipped cream, syrup, brown sugar, white sugar, no sugar and mocha drizzle.”
Sushi is just the start of Kinjo’s culinary diversity
Kinjo Sushi & Grill is a little regional empire, serving reasonable, affordable fare at its seven Calgary locations. It’s got the Japanese standards covered: sushi, tempura, teriyaki, tempura.
But then Kinjo takes a sharp, unanticipated culinary detour, offering Korean fried chicken, bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwiches for $3 and… wait for it, Bolognese spaghetti at $5 a plate.
What really catches my eye is a standard Canadian breakfast—two eggs, a strip of bacon, a nice little sausage, sourdough toast and a wee mixed salad—all for $5.
Bacon and eggs breakfast for only $5
I won’t pretend it can touch a $15 or $20 chef-produced breakfast; the plastic serving plate screams of fast food. But it hits the spot for a pocket full of change, a strategy that, on the day I visit, attracts a reasonable morning crowd to this large, bright restaurant.
Kinjo is a bright, spacious space
Sit down for breakfast here, and you can truly circle the culinary globe.
Kinjo Sushi and Grill 120 Stewart Green SW (Westhills) and six other Calgary locations Breakfast served daily 8 am-noon 587-864-8523
Marathon Mouth 