The Bothy (Downtown) Wine & Whisky Bar
10124 124 St.
780 760 8060
thebothy.ca
Open 3 p.m.
Closings: Sun.-Mon 9 pm;
Tues 10 pm; Wed 11 pm;
Thurs 12 midnight; Fri-Sat 2 am
Food: 4 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 4 of 5 Suns
Service: 3.5 of 5 Suns
The Bothy Wine & Whisky Bars have been around too long to be seen as a new phenomenon.
The original on the south side was one of first pubs in town to introduce seriously good food along with an extensive selection of wines and whiskys.
Today, dozens of establishments do the same thing, among them The Glass Monkey, the Fionn MacCool chain, the venerable Rose & Crown and, for wine and light eats, the Wine Room on Jasper Avenue.
Bothy proprietor Doug Townshend was happy enough with the original Bothy south side to expand into the The Bothy Downtown in the heart of Edmonton’s latest dining precinct, 124 Street from Jasper Avenue to 108 Avenue.
No doubt Townshend fell in love with the space just around the corner where Jas ...
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A lot of lawyers went to work early this morning," chuckled the veteran politician on hearing that four girders being installed at 2 a.m. Monday on the new 102 Avenue bridge across Groat Road had somehow simultaneously buckled.
The lawyers won't be dealing with this minor but intriguing catastrophe, at least not for a few months.
Yes, it is minor.
Nobody was hurt or injured.
The buckled girders, some 160 tonnes worth of combined weight, did not come crashing down into Groat Ravine.
Traffic will be disrupted on Groat Road and 102 Avenue. That's an annoying inconvenience, not a crisis.
The engineering/building community is intrigued. There's no obvious explanation. The experts consulted for this column dismiss the high winds theory. Alberta's bridge engineering/construction standards are among the world's best. The parties involved -- Supreme Steel, AECOM engineering and construction, Graham Construction - have excellent reputations. All are experienced bridge builders.
Nobody cuts corners. ...
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Welcome to Downtown Dining Week and you’d be crazy not to take advantage of the best dining deals in town through this coming Sunday, March 22 - $15 for top-notch lunches, $28 for “normal” three-course dinners, $48 for three-course “executive” dinners that would normally cost $65 or more at restaurants the Weekly Dish routinely awards four Suns or more out of five.
Restaurateurs are usually as co-operative as wolverines, given the intense competition for the dining dollar. This is a town with some 2,500 restaurants. At the high end, not that many folks can afford to routinely dine out at the $200-per-couple level. Last time I looked, most of us were middle-class, struggling with mortgage and car payments, raising kids. By the time the house was paid off, we’re saving for retirement.
Somehow the Edmonton Downtown Association’s executive director Jim Taylor persuaded 33 of the downtown’s better eateries to love each other, hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Taylor ...
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Review of Book of Mormon
Jubilee Auditorium,
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
March 24 to 29, 2015
(Sold out, other than last-minute lottery style rush tickets for $25)
Review by GRAHAM HICKS
I never watched much South Park on TV, but I read enough about the animated comedy to know it broke all the rules of pleasantry and politeness, was one of the first shows on widely-watched TV in the early ’90s to break the profanity barrier, and was screamingly funny through humourous commentary that made fun of just about every American icon, be it human or otherwise.
South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were natural heirs to the irreverent, damn the social torpedoes school of American satirical humour that broke through with George Carlin, gestated in Saturday Night Live, spawned The Simpsons and John Belushi.
So it wasn’t surprising that Parker, Stone and third collaborator Robert Lopez again broke all the rules when they wrote Book of Mormon, certainly the most successful Broadway s ...
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Spread out those Tarot cards, old gypsy queen, and tell us whither goest oil and gas.
Are we doomed to $50 or lower oil prices forever?
Will excess greenhouse gases caused by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas raise the world’s temperatures until all is parched desert and the oceans are metres higher due to polar ice melt?
To save the planet, as per American President Barack Obama’s line of thought, must the world end its reliance on fossil fuels - within our children’s lifetime?
If demand for oil and gas dwindles, will Alberta turn into a have-not province? Will 100,000 young people a year leave for greener pastures in (choke) Ontario and Quebec?
The gypsy queen, like everybody else, does not know the future.
But logic and clear thinking suggest Obama is likely wrong, that the odds are excellent for long-term prosperity in this province, based on environmentally sound oil and gas production, based on sound, long-term, provincial government planning and policy.
Her ...
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JASPER – After the Mountain Park Lodges (MPL) annual shareholders’ meeting, as has been their custom for some 47 years since the first MPL Jasper hotel opened its doors, three generations of MPL owners gathered for dinner last weekend at its new hotel, The Crimson on Jasper’s Connaught Drive.
In the mid-1960s, when the Marmot Basin ski resort consisted of little more than a few tow ropes, the Jasper National Park administration expanded the Jasper townsite footprint, putting four new hotel-suitable properties up for very long-term leases.
Six hiking/skiing/outdoor enthusiasts and Edmonton doctors – obstetricians Jack Day, Tim Cameron, Steve Parlee and Leo Gans, anaesthesiologist Dr. Martin Hagen and his wife Dr. Odette Hagen - decided to combine business with pleasure.
Finding accommodation on weekend Jasper ski trips was problematic. Why not build their own hotel? Seven ownership shares, at $14,000 each, were divided between the docs, the Millar family (Millar Western), the F ...
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Evil Dave’s Grill
622 Patricia Avenue
Jasper, Alberta
780-852-3323
evildavesgrill.com
5 p.m. weekdays, 4 p.m. weekends
Food: 4 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 3.5 of 5 Suns
Service: 4 of 5 Suns
The name and the theme are a bit wacko, but the food is really, really good.
Good thing we’d made a reservation at Evil Dave’s Grill on a Saturday evening in Jasper. The cheerful restaurant was packed, the ambience having much to do with the glow that skiers give off after a beautiful day at the nearby Marmot Basin ski resort.
Amusingly, given the mildly adult tongue-in-cheek ‘hellish’ theme, the eatery was full of kids. The ski hill had been alive with munchkins, thanks to the Jasper Junior Olympics. Good food for the parents, kid-friendly staff and a kids’ menu bodes well for a loyal family clientele.
It’s Jasper. There’s magic in the air at the best of times and Evil Dave’s had a great buzz on. Jasper has more than its share of excellent c ...
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Bodega Tapas + Wine Bar at Sabor
10220 103 St.
780-757-1114
(Facebook page)
Food: 4 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 4 of 5 Suns
Service: 4 of 5 Suns
4 p.m. to 10 p.m. weekdays,
4 p.m. to 11 p.m. Fri./Sat.
5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Sundays
(No reservations)
Dinner for two, just food — basic $22, loaded $45
Tapas, claims Bodega Tapas Bar partner and chef Lino Olivera, started when an enterprising bartender to some king on some beach placed a slice of ham, or a “tapper” on top of the king’s goblet to keep the sand out. Obviously the king liked the ham as well as the wine and thus the great Spanish/Portuguese tradition of tapas — small dish snacks — began.
A back story is always entertaining, especially as light conversation is a perfect accompaniment to tapas. A more mundane origin of tapas cites Spanish sherry drinkers using ham slices to keep fruit flies out of their drinks.
We have neither sand nor fruit flies. Snow rarely drifts into our glasses. But t ...
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There was once a decrepit old house in the heart of the Highlands.
It had been a pleasant, older family home among many such homes in one of Edmonton’s heart ‘n’ soul, tree-lined, spacious, back-alley neighbourhoods.
The house needed upgrades. But it was bought by an absentee landlord, rented to riff-raff and turned into a drug den. In a few short years, the house had devolved into a neighbourhood blight.
So here’s what the neighbours did.
They bought the property, pooled their skills, hired where they had to, gutted and then renovated the 100-year-old house. They gave their teenagers summer jobs to do all the physical labour … plus the kids learned about buildings.
The house is now in its final stages of re-construction, the exterior design intact.
Once sold, it should make a small profit for the participating neighbours.
A small profit cash-wise, but consider the societal value:
Neighbourhood decay was stopped in its tracks, protecting current hom ...
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It’ Dog
8621 109 St.
780-438-4083
www.facebook.com/itdogsandchicken
Food: 4 of 5 Suns
Ambience: 2.5 of 5 Suns
Service: 3 of 5 Suns
Dinner for two, just food – $14, loaded $25
11 a.m. to 11 p.m., later on weekends.
Wondrous though it may be for convenience, cost and simple preparation, the hot dog sits close to the bottom of the food chain. It’s also alarmingly predictable in its toppings — ketchup, mustard, relish, sometimes onions and sauerkraut.
Even a Fat Franks upgrade — best quality sausage and roll, double the usual size — is conventional in the condiment department.
Which is why, as you dig into an It’ Dog with a knife and fork because it’s too messy and too big to fit directly into your mouth, you wonder … why hasn’t anybody thought of this before?
The It’ Dog Korean-fusion hot dog starts with a beautiful big top-quality sausage in a yummy, hot, soft pretzel bun. That’s just the start.
On to ...
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