Jasper in January organizers are hoping to lure foodies to the town’s many restaurants, with a revamped culinary adventure this weekend.
The Food-A-Palooza event is a culinary crawl featuring unique eats from some of Jasper’s finest restaurants.
From Jan. 30 to Feb. 1, restaurants across town will offer up a special dish, paired with a specific, complimentary drink, for $15.
The idea, according to the owner of Evil Dave’s Grill, Mike Day, is to draw hungry festival-goers into town by offering a smorgasbord of affordable dining options that they can pick and choose from.
“You can determine how many courses you want. So if you said ‘I want to go for five courses tonight’ you could just do five different places, spread it out over a couple of hours, and sample a whole bunch of unique places.”
He explained that during Jasper in January restaurants are often booked fairly solid with reservations. The quicker nature of the dining experience, combined with the self-guided nature of the event, will allow diners to pick and choose where they want to eat and avoid packed houses.
All the participating restaurants and their corresponding dishes are listed on Tourism Jasper’s mobile-ready website, which Day said is intended to act as a guide for diners as they choose where to chow down.
And according to Day, that choice will likely be a difficult one.
“The restaurant owners didn’t [collaborate on] what each person was doing, and yet everyone has come up with some really interesting offers,” Day said. “Everyone’s been really creative with it.”
Evil Dave’s, for example, will offer bulgogi beef sliders on green onion cakes paired with a Chilean Shiraz. Papa Georges will cook up a hard-boiled quail egg that’s breaded and wrapped in ground elk, paired with Andreas Bender Pinot Noir. The Jasper Brewing Company, on the other hand, plans to serve a crème brûlée paired with specially made maple chocolate porter.
While he promised many delicious dishes, Day is also excited about what the event represents on a larger scale for Jasper as a culinary destination.
“We’re trying to get Jasper to have a higher culinary draw, to really highlight that we have unique things here,” he said.
“Were saying ‘hey, let’s raise the bar, let’s just keep pushing each other and challenging each other.’ And people are starting to take notice of that.”
Trevor Nichols
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