Chef Darren MacLean plates one of his dishes at EIGHT that is created to celebrate Canada’s culinary multiculturalism. (Vacay.ca photo)
Calgary is a city that reveals itself in layers, though I didn’t understand that back when I was growing up there in the 1980s and ’90s.
To me, the city was a contrast, a place of limits. As immigrants, we were limited on what we could afford, the places we could go. We kept to the familiar and the familiar was only what we could make at home.
The Calgary I knew wasn’t known for its food scene. For many immigrant families like mine the city’s restaurants were background scenery. They were restaurants our school friends’ families went to on special occasions, places we didn’t know how to enter. The entrances to many restaurants were as mysterious as underwater caves.
I was thinking of these entrances at two restaurants in Calgary, Rouge and EIGHT, during a recent visit. Rouge, housed in one of the city’s Victorian estates in Inglewood, is like walking into the familiar past. EIGHT, behind a secret doorway at the ALT Hotel in East Village, unveiled a Calgary I had almost forgotten about after leaving the city permanently in my late teens to go to university.
Calgary has always been more complicated than I realized, even back then.
Rouge reminded me of this city’s generosity and space for newcomers, even though its farmhouse is one of the city’s most historic homes. The home, which has an on-site garden, was once owned by A.E. Cross, one of the founders of the Calgary Stampede. The restaurant, co-founded by farm-to-table and foraging legend Chef Paul Rogalski, is outward-looking and deep-rooted.
Seasonal dishes during my visit included a potato leek soup with a smoky leek ash, a slightly spicy ginger potato fritter with a marjoram cream custard, and a lamb striploin accompanied by roasted zucchini and turnip in mint butter.
The dessert made me smile with memories of early-morning hockey practices at the community rink just a block away from my childhood home in the Crescent Heights neighbourhood.
The chocolate fennel cylinder was in the shape of a log with Ovaltine milk chocolate mouse inside, the barley-infused ice cream and the torched meringue resembled the snowy sides of an ice rink. It was a recreation of a scene, perfectly captured like a painting in a grey, blue shallow bowl the same shade of an early morning Calgary winter sky.
Rouge’s dessert is emblematic of Calgary and the restaurant’s fine-dining panache. (Guillermo Serrano photo for Vacay.ca)
EIGHT, led by Darren MacLean, one of the country’s most acclaimed chefs, is the restaurant that told my story in a way that felt both familiar and new. MacLean’s version of Canada, of Calgary, felt like an invitation back into a city I thought I had already left behind yet never forgot.
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Right away, in the first of (you guessed it) eight courses, I realized these were dishes that spoke about something that may seem contradictory. The first dish, Innisfail Carrots, paired madras curry and beetroot, which were flavours I never encountered as a child, with a third taste, coriander, an herb as familiar to me as anything from my earliest memories. The result was both a reminder of where I come from and a discovery of something new, a contrast that made this simple plate feel like it was telling the story of who I was and who I’ve become.
MacLean explained that he had grown up with both an Indian auntie and a Chinese one, the mothers of boyhood friends. He’s created at EIGHT a restaurant that wasn’t just about my identity, but the Calgarian one, and the Canadian one.
Dishes at Calgary’s acclaimed EIGHT include Alberta ingredients that tell the story of Canadian cuisine. In this one, local Innisfail Carrots are blended with Madras curry. (Guillermo Serrano for Vacay)
Other dishes like the Canadian Wilds, venison crudo, venison sausage with foraged mushroom and truffle mole, and dry-aged duck with Szechuan crosnes and mousse, were narratives of dishes inspired by neighbours, traditions that stayed within the family and borrowed from one our friends.
What I ate that night was not just about rediscovering my place in the city I knew as a child, but seeing how my one identity helped create the Calgary of today.
