Winnipeg’s locavore restaurant wave

by Alex Robertson Textor on


Manitoba is pretty far north, all things considered. On its southern edge, the province straddles the Minnesota-North Dakota state line; to the north, the province stretches to the 60th parallel, where it borders the territory of Nunavut. Yet despite its northerly geography, Manitoba has enough frost-free days to generate some significant agricultural production. Here’s the locavore math: Local seasonal bounty plus enthusiastic adoption of the current locavore vogue by Winnipeggers equals some excellent restaurants grounded in local foods.

Three restaurants (Mise, The Tallest Poppy, and Horfrost in nearby Portage La Prairie) stand out.

My meal at Mise (842 Corydon Avenue) began with a large salad of heirloom tomatoes with sunflower oil dressing. Next up was sesame-encrusted pickerel from nearby Lake Winnipeg, served delightfully and surprisingly with seaweed salad and unagi sauce. For my third course, I enjoyed a Manitoba pork tenderloin with potatoes and apple chutney. A refreshing lemon mousse finished the meal. Everything was gorgeous. The outdoor setting was sultry, the waitstaff enthusiastic and well-informed, and each dish delicious and provocative in one or another way. Co-owner Sue Gereta circled back to my table several times to check in on my meal, and told me about the restaurant’s ambitious local sourcing protocol, which includes partnering with a small outfit called the Landless Farmers Collective. In addition to being a fabulous place to grab a meal, Mise is quite affordable. A three-course meal of appetizer-sized plates is currently priced at C$35.

It was at the very least a private mini-tragedy that I did not make it to The Tallest Poppy (631 Main Street). The wildly popular locavore restaurant is focused firmly on sourcing its food as locally and seasonally as possible. The menu changes daily. Guests can call for menu information (204-957-1708) or check the restaurant’s Twitter feed, which sometimes lists menu updates.In Portage La Prairie, about an hour west of Winnipeg by car along Highway 1, is the remarkable Horfrost Restaurant (190 River Road). Named after a type of ice crystallization that appears on trees in northern climes during the winter, Horfrost sources much of its bounty from local farms. My road trip companion Melissa and I ate fried pig’s ears, bison spring rolls, and maple fries to start. The pig’s ears were the slightest bit crunchy. The bison spring rolls were rich and intensely flavorful. We followed with a schnitzel. Dessert was homemade ice cream (including locally-picked mint and strawberry) with chocolate sauce. Our talkative waiter told us that the farmer responsible for the ice cream’s strawberries was dining just a few tables away. After-dinner coffee was served with beautifully pressed pucks of sugar (see above).

Though less locavore-minded than the other restaurants profiled here, I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the fabulous Segovia (484 Stradbrook Avenue). Its menu is well-stocked with fabulously rich, delicious tapas. There are traditional Spanish numbers as well as some inventive departures from the mold on the menu.

Check out my entire road trip to Winnipeg series here.

Some media support for my stay in Winnipeg was provided by Tourism Winnipeg and Travel Manitoba. All opinions expressed are my own.

Winnipeg: Folklorama

by Alex Robertson Textor on


In Winnipeg, as in most big Canadian cities, there is an unassimilated immigrant presence at the surface of daily life. Canada has an official policy of multiculturalism, enshrined in the constitution, and cultural displays of difference are actively encouraged by federal and provincial governments. Winnipeg’s diversity is impressive. The city has a significant Francophone minority, several large immigrant communities, including Canada’s largest per capita Filipino population (at over five percent), and a relatively big Aboriginal population. This is just the tip of the iceberg, however. Over 100 languages are spoken by city residents.

Enter Folklorama, an annual August multicultural festival. Since 1970, Folklorama has provided a celebratory space for Winnipeg’s various immigrant groups to showcase their traditional culture, food, and performance. This year 45 different pavilions were set up to host guests and provide a little cultural exposure.

Last year Folklorama saw over 400,000 visitors over the two weeks of its festival. Folklorama has become a major event on Winnipeg’s cultural calendar. Admission to each individual pavilion is just C$6, and children 12 and under enter free of charge. Most pavilions focus on a live performance, but there is also traditional food and drink for purchase, as well as informational booths and boutique areas where various traditional objects can be purchased.

The Folklorama experience is quite moving, and in no small part because the participants are so enthusiastic. I attended three pavilions. At the first, the Chilean pavilion, we ate empanadas and drank wine prior to a performance, which was kicked off by the Canadian and Chilean national anthems. The rollicking Irish pavilion followed, and the evening ended at the Brazilian Pavilion, with its energetic samba and capoeira performance.

I took a Folklorama VIP World Tour on the opening night of this year’s festival. The VIP World Tour provides expedited access to three pavilions an evening, a progressive meal (including beverages), and coach service between pavilions. It costs C$69.95 per person.

During the 50 non-festival weeks of the year, Folklorama operates workshops, lectures, and other forums to educate Winnipeggers about their city’s many different cultures. This year’s two-week Folklorama ends this Saturday, but it’s not too early to start thinking about next year’s Folklorama festival.

Check out other dispatches on my road trip to Winnipeg here.

Some media support for my stay in Winnipeg was provided by Tourism Winnipeg and Travel Manitoba. All opinions expressed are my own.

(Image: Flickr/noricum)

Why Winnipeg should be on your radar

by Alex Robertson Textor on


When I first visited Winnipeg, in 2005, I did so on the advice of an art world acquaintance in New York who spent a lot of professional time in Canada. I asked him which Canadian city he deemed to be coolest. After a perfunctory nod to Montreal, he zeroed in on Winnipeg. He cited the city’s high culture, its dynamic contemporary creative figures, its prairie sunsets, and its very undiscovered status as reasons to visit.

When I got to Winnipeg I found a city teeming with good cultural, architectural, and culinary stuff. I also found a city that seemed to know itself. There are countless cities in North America obsessed with their relationship to New York or Los Angeles. Winnipeg is not one of these. If Winnipeg has an inferiority complex, it is tempered by the recognition that quality of life is high and opportunities feel boundless here.

There is quite simply something very special about Winnipeg. It’s a bit of a Grand Old Dame, with a genteel spirit at play across charming residential and commercial neighborhoods. It’s not always the prettiest city. The city’s downtown lacks a unified scale, and a clutch of Brutalist buildings make a dramatic claim on the urban landscape. (The latter always strike me as desperately beautiful, though anecdotal evidence suggests that I’m in the minority in this respect.) There are parks and monuments and unexpected corners. There is also The Forks, an enormous multipurpose entertainment area, which organizes a lot of leisure time in the city.Winnipeg’s strong creative scene is partially attributable to its deep winter freeze, which has fostered a creative atmosphere. The city has a deep artistic tradition that has produced a bevy of contemporary filmmakers and artists. Ponder the work of local filmmakers Guy Maddin and Noam Gonick and you gain some real insight into Winnipeg, a city bound to its many idiosyncrasies, the harsh climate, and its varied ethnic diversity.

There’s also the question of the city’s population in relation to the surrounding territory. There are 1.2 million people in Manitoba; around 650,000 of them live in Winnipeg. Winnipeg is the only metropolis of note for a great distance. The prairie is just outside the city, and it is vast. Winnipeg draws the country refugees in magnetically.

Winnipeg has a number of major projects underway; the most notable of these, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, is scheduled to be finished in 2012. The museum is is a very ambitious and very heady undertaking. In architectural terms alone, it will be a tour de force. There is already talk in Winnipeg about a future Bilbao Effect.

By the end of my second visit to Winnipeg last week I’d discovered more delightful Manitoban quirks: the phenomenon of the wedding social; the local appetite for Slurpees, even in the dead of winter; the fact that, in early August, I saw leaves that had already turned color; the genuine friendliness of completely random people.

Over the next few days, I’ll post reports on Winnipeg’s Folklorama cultural festival, Winnipeg’s museum scene, the city’s locavore wave, The Forks, and some other dimensions of this exciting city.

See my entire road trip to Winnipeg series here.

Some media support for my stay in Winnipeg was provided by Tourism Winnipeg and Travel Manitoba. All opinions expressed are my own.

Canadian prairie road trip day three: Regina-Winnipeg

by Alex Robertson Textor on

On the third and sadly final full day of our Canadian prairie road trip adventure, we wake up slowly in Regina. We race around the city before taking off for our long journey to Winnipeg, first stopping at a bakery and convenience store in the Cathedral Village neighborhood, and then dashing over to the bustling Atlantis Coffee at Hamilton and Victoria, where the espresso is good and the cashier sports stylishly thick plastic frames.

From here we set out along Provincial Highway 44. Our first planned stop is the village of Labret, a small village with the Stations of the Cross erected across its hillside. Somehow, due to my navigational distractedness, we miss the turnoff for Highway 10 in the town of Balgonie and end up on a minor road, mesmerized by the fields of wheat, mustard, rapeseed, and flax. The last of these is a bluish violet.

We keep driving. The clouds became more dramatic and we have to stop to take more photos. Here the dragonflies are thick and eager and the stillness is profound.

Once we’ve sorted out our path we end up in Fort Qu’Appelle and check in at the visitors’ center, which doubles as an art gallery. Some of the accents here are deeply Saskatchewanian, and I have trouble for the first time trying to understand a local. We are given a tour of the galleries, which showcase the work of area artists.

We pass on to the tiny village of Labret. The village is beautiful in an epic manner, completely worth the detour. SK Books & Collectibles, a vintage bookshop, is stocked with 17,000 books, including tons of first editions and rare books. The shop has an especially strong collection of Western Canadian history and culture titles. “How could you ever get tired of this terrain?” I ask the bookstore’s owner. “I never do,” he responds.Labret boasts an enormous stone church and a hillside Stations of the Cross. We walk up and check out the incredible views from up top.

Following Labret we drive through lakeside cottage country. One settlement, Sandy Beach, is so charming that I’m suddenly beset by cottage envy.

From there it’s a long, straight shot to the visitors’ center at the Saskatchewan/Manitoba border, where we pick up a photocopied map of Brandon, Manitoba’s second biggest city. Later we circle downtown Brandon before stopping for a late lunch at Lady of the Lake, an enormous boutique/restaurant. My sandwich is delicious. The boutique side of the Lady features a table devoted to Manitoban body care products. We drive on for another 90 minutes to Portage La Prairie.

Our penultimate stop is here, at the very fine Horfrost Restaurant. That this restaurant is located in Portage La Prairie, a town with fewer than 15,000 residents, is a wonder. Horfost is an outstanding restaurant with a strong locavore focus, a place so exciting that it merits inclusion in another post. But here’s a teaser trio: fried pig’s ears, bison spring rolls, maple fries.

From Horfrost we speed through the night to West Gate Manor, a bed and breakfast in a leafy Winnipeg neighborhood, where we spend the final night of our road trip. Portage Avenue’s lights and traffic roll out to greet us. This is not Winnipeg at its most charming, granted, but it serves as a dramatic narrative bookend to our journey, a goodbye to the vast prairie behind us.

Read the entire road trip series here.

Some media support for this road trip was provided by Tourism Saskatchewan. All opinions belong to the author.

The great Canadian prairie road trip: Calgary-Saskatoon-Regina-Winnipeg

by Alex Robertson Textor on

This road trip had its genesis in idle travel fantasy chat, as so many journeys do. A few months ago my friend Melissa and I discussed how much we wanted to do a road trip together over the summer, and we cranked out a number of ambitious itineraries. The craziest of all involved Melissa driving 18 hours by herself from Colorado to Alberta to pick me up prior to an eastward run across Canada. Perhaps it’s best, all things considered, that this particular itinerary did not work out.

Time and other constraints meant that we had to curtail our ambition just a bit. We settled on a four-night Calgary-Winnipeg itinerary, with stops in Drumheller, Saskatoon, Moose Jaw, Regina, Brandon, and Portage La Prairie, a distance of 1486 kilometers or 912 miles.

Sounds great, right? Not so fast, cowboy. It turns out to be difficult to orchestrate a Canadian prairie road trip with a rental car. One-way car rentals are scarce in Canada. In fact, we were unable to find a single car rental company that would let us pick a car up in Calgary and drive it to Winnipeg.

After exhausting online booking site options, I turned to Twitter. The ever-generous travel writer Eva Holland suggested we take a look at Rent-A-Wreck. We did, and were disappointed to discover that the outfit doesn’t operate in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The rather less literally helpful Grant Martin suggested that we purchase the PaceSaver Plus III Electric Scooter that he so kindly found on Craigslist.

We even looked into the possibility of renting a U-Haul, rejecting that option because it was too expensive. Thinking that there might have been some secret I’d missed, I even checked in with the very helpful logistics team at Travel Alberta. Again, no dice.

Disaster! How would we ever consummate our Canadian prairie road trip?
Fairly easily, as it turns out. Once we started scrambling everything fell into place quickly. We found a one-way Winnipeg-bound car rental originating in Saskatoon. And then we found a cheap one-way fare on WestJet between Calgary and Saskatoon. (A silver lining was already emerging, as I’ve wanted to fly WestJet for some time.)

Cutting out the first day on the road means that we’ll miss some beautiful territory across Alberta and Saskatchewan, Drumheller in particular. In place of that first day on the road, we’ll spend a morning exploring Calgary and a long afternoon and evening in Saskatoon. With the replacement of Calgary by Saskatoon as the point of our road trip’s origination, our road trip will shrink to 873 km, or 542 miles. Here’s the itinerary breakdown. Day 1: Nighttime arrival in Calgary. Day 2: Calgary and Saskatoon. Day 3: Saskatoon to Regina by way of Moose Jaw by car. Day 4: Regina to Winnipeg by way of Brandon and Portage La Prairie by car.

In addition to my posts here, I’ll be tweeting about my Canadian prairie road trip with the hashtag #cdnprairieroadtrip for the next few days. Our road trip will deliver me to Winnipeg, where I’ll spend the following five nights reacquainting myself with the Manitoban metropolis.

Read the entire road trip series here.

Some media support for this road trip was provided by Travel Alberta and Tourism Saskatchewan. All opinions belong to the author.

(Image: Flickr / Space Ritual)