I should be ashamed for not getting this up sooner; I used to be a Calgary girl, born and raised, but my home, my real home now is Montreal. I do try to visit once in a while and since going gf I’ve been to a few places that I would like to share with you.
Most recently and still engraved in my meat memory is Bolero’s. My friends Natasha (smarty pants who I met in Girl Guides and my first friend in public school), Jason (Natasha’s wonderful husband) and Sarah (same Sarah I met up with in Munich) have been living in different cities for the past ten years and we finally managed to organize ourselves to be in the same city for some food and visiting. Our venue of choice was a meat haven called Bolero.
Hears a taste:
Bolero.
This restaurant calls itself an “Authentic Brazilian Steak House”, I’ve never been to Brazil, so I can not verify the authenticity of this statement, but this is unimportant. We need to talk about the magic meat stick! Each table has this adorable little cue with three colours on it — the two most significant colours on this stick are red and green and as usual, green means go! Bring the meat! The waiters walk around with a massive variety of meat filled skewers and as long as the green end is up they stop at your table and fill your dish with whatever they have. There is also a buffet of sides and salads, which the waiter happily took me through pointing out the dishes I could eat. This place was perfect for us! The food was delicious and there was plenty of it, the style of service allowed us to take our time and visit with each other for several hours and I got to sit back and eat whatever came at me.
What we ate:
Everything (especially the meat wrapped in bacon and grilled pineapple) and coconut rice
At the bottom of the menu on-line:
“Please Note that all of our meats are Gluten Free, as are most of our fresco bar and salad bar items. Please do not hesitate to ask any questions in this regard.”
Woot!
Website:
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I think most people with food allergies are on the hunt for new products and as a natural born shopper, I love the hunt. I love finding new food options and companies and stores that cater to allergic living. Calgary has a great health food store called Community Natural Foods. My mother has been buying some of her baking ingredients there for years, but it wasn’t until my diagnoses that our gf goggles fell off and we discovered their fantastic array of gf products. Click on the Community “Gluten Free Products” link and you’ll download 34 pages of products! One product my Mom treated me to upon arrival was this adorable mini pumpkin and pecan loaf. It was gooey and sweet and didn’t have a single hint of funny gf flour taste, now if only I could remember who it was by…help? We’ll just have to wait for my next trip to Cowtown.
REWIND to Christmas 2009:
I usually make it back to Calgary around the holidays and whenever my whole family is together we go for a big family meal with our godparents and their girls. Our food of choice used to be Chinese, unfortunately I haven’t found any gf Chinese in Calgary, so keeping it in the family style dinning genre we chose Thai. This restaurant is one of my Calgary favorites and I was so happy to find out that they could cater to celiac Devon. I don’t think Andrew and his peanut allergy would have had as much of a good time at this place, but Thai is never fun for the anti-peanut.
Hears a taste:
The King & I.
I don’t know enough adjectives to explain how delicious this food is. I love the mix of salty and sweet, soft and crunchy and aromatic and spicy flavours in this cuisine. You’ll have to forgive me, too much has time has passed and I can’t remember exactly what we ordered, but I can tell you that the kitchen knows their stuff. With the arrival of each dish the waitress kindly reminded me which dishes I could and could not eat. My wonderful family knows the table drill…no mixing spoons!
Things you should definitely order:
Poppy Shrimp (get 2 orders if there are more than 4 of you, you can thank me later)
Gaeng Keo Wan Pet – spicy green curry of boneless duck with fresh Thai eggplants (their green curry is amazing)
Coconut Rice, coconut rice, coconut rice
Website:
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girl verses gluten 