ChowTown.ca

A three-hour movie, several dining possibilities, and one increasingly obsessive search for Saturday dinner in Calgary.

For the first time in more than three years, I find myself once again back in Calgary with a serious problem – okay, we live in Airdrie but I’ve been in a hospital bed in Calgary for more than six months and can now get day passes. Yup, freedom! –

Not another medical problem. Not a financial problem. Not even the problem of explaining to Nancy why I need another computer or piece of essential kitchen equipment.

A food problem.

After years living in Qatar, and after a fairly ridiculous lifetime of eating my way through restaurants, markets, seafood shacks, smokehouses and kitchens around the world, I have returned to a Calgary food scene that has changed considerably. Some old friends remain. Some have disappeared. Others have apparently been replaced by restaurants selling $24 sandwiches that would once have been considered a desperate cry for help.

So, naturally, we began looking for somewhere to have dinner on Saturday following what is a particularly long movie (just guess).

The criteria were simple enough (to me): seafood or serious barbecue. Preferably both but I do live in reality. Still, it needs to be somewhere worth the trouble. Somewhere that might actually surprise us.

This turned out to be more complicated than expected.

We started with seafood boils. Bag O’Crab looked promising on paper, with crab, shrimp, crawfish, clams and the obligatory sauces with names suggesting that someone in the kitchen has a personal grudge against the human digestive tract. The American locations generally review well, and the Calgary operation has respectable numbers.

But respectable isn’t necessarily interesting.

I’ve been cooking seafood boils for years. I’ve bought and eaten shellfish in places where the ocean was essentially the supplier, and I’ve eaten seafood in Louisiana and New Orleans often enough to know for example that “Cajun” printed on a menu doesn’t necessarily mean Cajun.

The same problem arose when I started looking at barbecue spots.

Calgary has no shortage of places calling themselves Texas BBQ, Southern BBQ, Carolina BBQ or some other variation thereof, often abusing the word “smoke” simultaneously. But I’ve spent years smoking my own brisket, ribs, pork belly and sausage. I know what happens when brisket comes out dry. I know what happens when ribs are overcooked. I have the PTSD to prove my BBQ chops. I know the difference between smoke and the taste of having something waved briefly in the general direction of burning wood.

And, perhaps more importantly, I know precisely what I like.

Texas? Absolutely.

East Texas? Even better.

Carolina? Now we’re talking.

Eastern North Carolina vinegar-and-pepper sauce? You now have my full attention.

Lexington-style? Also very welcome at the table.

What I didn’t want was simply another restaurant that had discovered the word “Southern” and decided it would look good on the website.

I quickly moved away from barbeque due to having not found anything too interesting and circled back to seafood in one form or another. This was the craving that required suffonsification – if that’s not a word it needs to be –

This brings us to the issue of chowder.

Ah, chowder.

This is where things get dangerous.

I have a longstanding and possibly pathological attachment to New England and Atlantic Canadian style chowders. Full disclosure: I’ve never eaten it in New England or Atlantic Canada but have done so in many other places far beyond.

I have also developed my own seafood chowder to the point where describing it as “a soup” would probably get me thrown out of my own kitchen.

So when I see “seafood chowder” on a menu, I don’t merely ask whether it is good.

I have questions.

Is it actually seafood-forward?

Are there clams?

Can I taste the above?

Is the broth rich without being wallpaper paste?

Are the potatoes contributing body to the broth or merely occupying space?

Has somebody managed to cook the shellfish properly?

And, most importantly, does it taste like somebody cared?

This initially brought us, somewhat unexpectedly, to considering Big Fish & Open Range.

I remember eating at the original Big Fish years ago, which makes the current incarnation particularly interesting. The restaurant has evolved, merged with Open Range, and now offers a considerably broader menu. But buried in that menu is something that immediately caught my attention:

East Coast Seafood Chowder.

Not “seafood soup.”

Not “creamy fish bisque.”

Perhaps actual Chowder.

We also found oysters, mussels and a number of other dishes on offer that made the place worth another look.

But then came Blowers & Grafton.

And suddenly Saturday dinner acquired a destination.

Is this simple laziness given the proximity to the theatre? Ordinarily I’d cop to that but Bag ‘O Crabs is walking distance from said theatre and I have to actually get out of my wheelchair into our car (with all this entails) and drive to Blowers & Grafton.

This is a restaurant that proudly wears its Halifax/East Coast identity on its sleeve. It has seafood chowder. It has mussels. It has fried clams. And yup, it has garlic fingers.

Garlic fingers.

Now we’re leaning into the potentially dangerous.

A proper garlic finger with the requisite cup of donair sauce is one of those foods that has no business being as wonderful as it is. Dough, garlic butter, cheese and a bowl of thick, sweet, garlicky donair sauce. That’s it. No culinary thesis required.

So the plan emerged.

Nancy and I will go to Blowers & Grafton following the nearly three hour long movie.

The chowder gets tested.

The mussels get tested.

The fried clams get tested.

The garlic fingers get tested.

We’ve gone over my chowder “issue” but I’ve also bought a “box of clams” on several coasts including in places like Seattle and New Orleans. I’ve eaten mussels fresh from the ocean in Ireland, New Zealand, England, Australia, South Africa, Scotland and Canada to name but a few. My enjoyment of garlic fingers is decades in the making.

Nancy will naturally order at the very least a main of her choosing, thereby preserving marital harmony and providing me with an entirely legitimate opportunity to sample her food under the universally recognized doctrine of “quality control.”

And then we will see what happens.

Maybe we’ll find a genuinely good slice of Halifax in Calgary.

Maybe we’ll discover a chowder that deserves serious consideration and further large scale research.

Maybe the mussels will be excellent.

Maybe the fried clams will remind me of the greasy cardboard boxes from my past.

Or maybe we’ll discover that the people of Calgary have once again taken something wonderful from somewhere else, put it through the local restaurant machine and emerged with something that is perfectly pleasant but bears only a passing resemblance to the original.

That’s the fun part of it.

You don’t know until you sit down and eat.

And after our years away, that’s exactly what I’m looking forward to: sitting down, ordering something I’ve eaten a hundred different ways in a dozen different places, and finding out whether Calgary has anything new to say about it.

Saturday’s dinner will provide the evidence.

ChowTown will render its preliminary verdict soon.