Wednesday, August 26, 2015

A Calgary Food and Art Tour (Calgary, Alberta, Canada)

I visited Calgary for the first time (OK, second time, but the first time was only for 2 hours so that doesn't count) earlier this summer. A great way to explore the city and especially its dining scene is to join Calgary Food Tours. I got a blogger discount through the Calgary Tourism Board so I took my cousins along! There are a few different tours you can choose from and in different areas of Calgary - I chose the Palette to Palate tour since it combined both food and viewing art in the surrounding area.
The meeting point was Hotel Arts in the downtown area, an appropriate place for an art tour.

Calgary Food Tour
Calgarians love their horses

Hotel Arts displays quite a few interesting modern art throughout the first floor - many of them are local artists from the Alberta area. Our guide (a lovely former Texan called Regan) took us through some of them, discussing the background and meaning of each.
Calgary Food Tour

For our first food stop, we stopped at Yellow Door Bistro, which was inside the Hotel Arts. Chef Duncan Ly from Yellow Door prepared some of the best carbonara pasta our group has ever had, topped with crispy pancetta and crisped basil leaves. The sweet, local tomatoes cut the richness of the dish.
Calgary Food Tour
They paired this with an Australian Sauvignon Blanc, which was quite nice.

We walked to the Gibson Fine Art gallery, stopping at a couple of spots in between.
Calgary Food Tour
The gallery owner showed us some of the local artwork - this gallery mostly displays local artists. During the gallery tour, we were served some sherry and a few delectable desserts from Brûlée Patisserie.
Calgary Food Tour

We walked to the patisserie after to take a quick look, and I had to buy some of the cookies we got earlier!

From Brûlée , we walked upstairs to the Cookbooks Co bookstore and also tasted some maple syrup. This maple syrup was made using the highest barometric pressure out of all maple syrups in the area since these maple trees are nestled in the Appalachians, making it one of the world's highest elevation maple source.
Calgary Food Tour

Just behind the cookbook store is MetroVino Wines, a cute wine store where we had a tasting and history lesson of Beaujolais
Calgary Food Tour

One of the MetroVino owners, Richard Harvey, told us about the obsession over Beaujolais Nouveau and how Parisians competed to get the freshest of these wines to their restaurants/bars in the city. That obsession spread all over the world, but it's just silly to participate in North America since the Beaujolais Nouveau is no longer fresh after crossing the ocean.
Calgary Food Tour

Afterwards, we continued on our dessert kick with Coconut cupcakes from Decadent Desserts.
Calgary Food Tour

Decadent Desserts is famous for their coconut cake, which is coconut cream layered between a white cake and topped with cream cheese frosting and coconut flakes. Their usual cupcake version doesn't have the cream inside, but just for the tour (Calgary Food Tour's owner is a longtime fan of the coconut cake), they make coconut cupcakes with the cream filling inside!

After, we finished off at Avec Bistro, a modern space that's housed in what is formerly a hole in the wall noodle shop.
Calgary Food Tour

A chocolate torte with blueberries and a pot of green tea wrapped up our walking tour for the day.
Calgary Food Tour

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