The last word on my recent trip to Denver will be all about the food. I spent remarkably little money for some truly delicious eats. Here are a few of the highlights…
Euclid Hall – On a recommendation from a colleague, I headed here for dinner the first night and had what was probably the most unique of the dishes I sampled on my trip – a green chile and pork cheek poutine. It was a perfect blend of sweet, hot and salty:
Arriving back in Reykjavik from a day trip of Iceland’s Golden Circle, there was no question as to the evening’s activities – this was my chance to sample a few Icelandic foods I couldn’t miss. One in particular was something I wouldn’t miss trying even if the thought of it caused more than a little bit of apprehension.
Hákarl. The shark.
I’ve been to a few expensive places in which to travel over the past couple of years (Zurich, I’m looking at you), but nothing really prepared me for the cost of eating in Norway. In other costly cities – Paris, New York, Milan, I’ve had no trouble finding great economical places to eat where I felt I got a taste of the location. Not so in Norway. Seth Kugel, the New York Times “Frugal Traveler” put it best when he recently wrote:
Norway is the extreme Scandinavian case, though — the only country I’ve ever been in where I suffered from constant, low-grade budget anxiety. On the opposite end is Sweden, which, if you come directly from Norway, feels like you’ve entered a 173,300-square-mile Costco.
Traveling is about the memories – being a couple of accountants, we budget for trips so we’re not thinking about money while away. With that planning we saved our travel dollars for the cuisine of Iceland laying ahead in our travels and quickly labeled Norway as a place where we’d live off of grocery store food for a few days. This was our first supper in Bergen, and still clocked in at around $20:
This trip to Scandinavia wasn’t really a foodie trip for me. That had nothing to do with the cuisines of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, all wonderful and worth exploring, but more the economics of eating out repeatedly over a 14 day trip in some very expensive countries. In prioritizing what I wanted to try in Sweden, reindeer was at the top of my list. I managed two tastes on the same day. The first came at Skansen when I stepped up to order a #4:
Before writing more about our time spent in Sweden, I feel compelled to write about the wonderful options for gluten-free eating in this great country. My fiancée was diagnosed with Celiac a number of years ago. On our travels in non-English speaking countries, this has made for a few difficulties while eating out. Sometimes we have to simply leave a restaurant, sometimes my love is on the receiving end of a dirty look or an uninspiring meal while I go to town on a delicious dish she can’t have. Not so in Sweden. At every eating establishment we visited, there was an immediate understanding of Celiac Disease and the requirement for strict gluten-free food. Everyone was good enough to warn us about possible cross-contamination if any items were fried in oil used for other non-gluten-free items. You come to expect that level of service at nicer restaurants, but on this trip, a true sense of the ease of gluten-free eating came from visits to a couple of fast food places and cafes.
Not the kind of place we’d normally visit while traveling, but when your partner hasn’t had a fast food hamburger in more than three years, McDonald’s becomes a bit of a novelty. So much of a novelty, that on our arrival we dropped our bags at the hotel and made a beeline to the first set of golden arches we saw. Here are the gluten-free versions of their double cheeseburger and Big Mac. Taste-wise, they’re authentic to the regular burgers. The buns are actually pretty good:
When we started planning our Scandinavian trip we knew we were going to be taking it easy on restaurants given the general expense of eating out in Copenhagen. Luckily, we had a pretty comprehensive grocery store close to the hotel and a wonderful organic bakery with a selection of gluten free items made fresh every day (Naturbageriet). We also came to discover the very new market-based food hall, Torvehallerne, that was immediately between our main train station and our hotel (how lucky!):
Through a combination of my sister living there for close to 15 years, an extended work stint in 2007 and numerous business related travels to the city, Toronto doesn’t feel like a vacation destination – and that’s not a bad thing. With Dad and I both having some favourite haunts in the city, we hit a couple of them over our three day vacation.
I generally eat pretty well wherever I go on vacation. Some advance planning of the “can’t miss” places goes a long way toward making that happen. When I was doing my advance scouting for Banff, it became apparent early on that there wouldn’t be enough days in the itinerary to try all of the places that I wanted to. Here are the highlights of a week’s worth of delicious food and drink.
I violated a key travel rule – never return to the same restaurant twice on the same trip. I broke that rule because the food was so good on the first visit to the Bear Street Tavern and there was a menu full of things I wanted to try. On the first visit, they were running a Thursday night special on their bison short ribs. I saw this menu item arrive to a salivating customer at the table next to us as I was considering my order and it swung my decision. These were incredible – enormous, meaty and tender with crispy bits of BBQ sauce clinging to the edges. The beer off to the side is Tree Brewery Hop Head IPA from Kelowna, BC. Ignore the salad in the picture (I sure did):
I really love Super Bowl Sunday. As football fans and foodies, many regular season Sundays at our place probably look like Super Bowl feasts to some, so on this day, we try to do a few things to spoil ourselves. Here’s what we ended up pulling together….
Roasted mixed nuts (coated with orange juice, maple syrup, cayenne pepper, salt and rosemary and roasted at 350F for 20 minutes) for grazing/snacking throughout the day – recipe courtesy of Halifax’s Feisty Chef. Really loved these – the recipe is a keeper for next season:
Roasted garlic and bacon dip. Made a few small alterations to the recipe including almost doubling the roasted garlic and adding a bit more bacon than called for (and that’s never a bad thing). This turned out really well:
What’s a Super Bowl without wings? These ones are Buffalo style and are just 6 of the 1.2 billion wings consumed worldwide during Super Bowl Sunday. I think chickens really need a better lobbyist for their interests:
A Super Bowl tradition for us is Jodi’s hot nacho dip. We bring this out a few times during the season. It capped off a day of snacks really well:
With a day of foods on the spicy side, I went with a selection of lagers – Sam Adams (its touch of floral/spice went well with the roasted spiced nuts), Red Stripe (very crisp, perfect with the Buffalo wings) and Creemore Springs (a bit of malt and a clean finish to pair with the nacho dip):
December 3 – Given Seattle’s reputation for coffee, I scouted out Caffe Umbria with a location close to my hotel for a morning cappuccino and croissant. Easily the best coffee I had in Seattle. This is a delicious way to start a day:
I grabbed a bag of coffee beans to bring back to Halifax with me and started to make my way to the Experience Music Project (EMP) museum. For about the next half hour, I feel like I descended into a series of Simpsons episodes. First, to get to EMP I need to take a ride on a monorail (and as it banks into the final turn heading past the museum, I can almost hear Lyle Lanley himself running off with bags of money after skimping on safety standards):
Then I lay eyes on the EMP and its Frank Gehry design harkens me back to his design of Springfield’s concert hall / Montgomery Burns state prison:
Simpsons references aside, this part of Seattle feels like time passed it by a bit. Seattle Center and the Space Needle came into being for the 1962 World’s Fair. Maybe it’s the chilly, grey morning I’m here, but it feels like it has seen better days. That being said, the Space Needle itself is a pretty impressive architectural landmark:
Here, the Space Needle and its reflection in the side of the EMP:
The EMP is one of the most interesting museums I’ve been to in my travels. There’s a bunch of displays on music history, especially focused on key artists of the Pacific Northwest (Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana and the other “grunge” acts of the 90s). One of the things I really enjoyed was a display of electric guitars through the ages, including this 1952 Gibson Les Paul:
As a bit of a collector of concert set lists, I liked this one – the set list from the last Nirvana show ever (in Germany):
One of the best features of this museum were the interactive rooms where you could play instruments. Here’s a picture of one of the “pods” of instruments – guitar, bass and drums. After some interactive instruction on how to play the instrument, you could team up with others in the pod to play parts of a song. For the pod I tried, I got to play rhythm guitar for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in concert with a bass player and a drummer who had just “learned” their instruments:
This impressive sculpture (“If VI was IX: Roots and Branches”) in the main hallway of the music-related displays let’s you hear the permutations of the sounds it can produce:
There were also great exhibits on the making of the movie “Avatar” and an installation on horror movies (with displays featuring costumes and props from the classics). The best part of the horror movie installation was that you could orchestrate the music and sounds in the room (I enjoyed a few minutes of adding screams and chainsaws to an orchestral piece which had a few folks looking at the displays wondering what was going on) Overall, it was a wonderful interactive museum and a great place to spend a few hours on a chilly overcast day.
The rest of my last vacation day in Seattle was about trying some drink and food. Making my may back to downtown Seattle, I stopped at Elysian Fields for lunch and tried their famously-entitled “Men’s Room Red” ale. Delicious:
On my way to supper, I make a quick stop in for happy hour at 106 Pine, a wine shop and tasting bar featuring a solid selection of Washington state wines. Here’s a Merlot that took some of the chill out of the evening:
From there, it was on to Andaluca for a Spanish-inspired small plates meal. First course: Broken Egg Papas Frites with chorizo and roasted mushrooms (and really, I could have just ordered this two more times and gone back to the hotel extremely happy):
Second course (complete with a warning that eating raw seafood may be a health hazard): Spicy Calamari bruschetta with saffron aioli – exceptionally fresh and very spicy/hot:
A very interesting Washington state Pinot Noir with strong hints of licorice. Unusual and interesting and quite nice for a cold night:
Last course: Paella with chicken, chorizo, grilled prawn, harissa butter and saffron:
Fully warmed up from the inside, I took in some of the Christmas lights in the shopping district of Seattle before heading back to the hotel. Among the pictures, the first and last ones below are of the Macy’s star and Christmas tree at Westlake Center:
Unfortunately, that marked the end of the vacation part of the trip. I did come away with some perspectives on Seattle in the course of just under 3 days:
1. Seattle is a very friendly city. People smile, engage in conversation and really seem to be down to earth folk. The west coast lifestyle is something I’m finding resonates with me.
2. The food culture in Seattle is something I could really get used to: Fresh seafood and variety like I haven’t seen in other coastal places including here in Halifax; Great local red wines; Enormous selection of microbrews across the spectrum of styles; A deep appreciation and care for the quality of food; It would be great to shop, cook and eat here.
3. In some respects, Seattle is like many other larger cities. But on its doorstep is immense natural beauty – lakes and rivers, mountains and pine trees. If/when I get back to this area, I’ll spend more time exploring what’s around this area. I could easily imagine this being a great place to live for a few years.
Bluenose Traveler 