Explore - our insights on Alberta and Canada's Top Destinations

Today, we want to gift you with these holiday party ideas for your favourite small group. Whether you are celebrating with a small group of friends, family or your work team, these ideas are a sure way to factor in some festive fun and keep your bank account jolly at the same time. The list is mostly nice, not too naughty, definitely novel and filled with affordable party ideas.   1. Beer and Bowling Breweries like National on 10th in Calgary have a bowling alley and, they take bookings in advance.  High Rollers in Banff features both beer and pizza – yum. And in Edmonton, try third generation owned Plaza Bowling for their Pints and Pins lanes. Go all out and have team bowling shirts made. Who knows, this could be your new brainstorming centre. 2. Nosh a Neighbourhood  Our Craving Kensington or Savour 17 SW…

  A food tour is a great way to get to know a place, its people and their way of life – especially what foods they enjoy. In this post we’ll not only look at what is a food tour but also the who, what, when, where and why of our company. The Who We’re Alberta Food Tours and we’ve been in business since 2006. Our president, Karen Anderson, is an award-winning cookbook author and co-author of Food Artisans of Alberta- Your Trail Guide to the Best of Our Locally Crafted Fare. We have over 20 members on our team and operate in four cities in our province. We have 90 plus partners and together we support about 150 farms. When you support us, we pay all our partners and team members and we all create a great food culture….

They say that the average “overnight success” takes about 14 years of effort. As we enter our thirteenth year of serving Calgary with fun – EAT. ENGAGE. EXPLORE. – food experiences, it feels like we are getting closer to fulfilling our purpose of building value for the soil, food and people in our city, province,…

Thanks to our friend Liane Faulder of the Edmonton Journal for including our Anti-Freeze food tour in her most recent Eat My Words Blog post. You can read it here. The details: Friday, March 2, 2018 – 5 – 7pm, $89/person plus GST and ticket fee. Price includes all food, beverages, tax and tips to the vendors. Please note: Because we sold out our March 2 tour, we’ve added a Thursday March 1 tour – same timings, same places. Thank you Edmonton!  We meet at The Marc for a surprise French appetizer treat with wine, go to Wishbone to enjoy chef Brayden Kozak’s famous Napa Cabbage Slaw and finish with meat treats with Kitchen by Brad’s Brad Smoliak. There will be beverage pairings with each stop and everyone leaves with some Jacek Chocolate to ensure sweet dreams. With this much camaraderie…

More items are being added to the menu that is Edmonton’s food scene all the time. Thanks to our dedicated team of food loving tour leaders we are always investigating the new offerings around town. We do a super fun tasting of food and beverages at five “downtown delights” along Jasper Avenue downtown on weekdays in the summer. We have a year round Sunday brunch offering coming in the Strathcona district this spring AND, we will create custom tours by request year round. Recently, we developed a tour especially for the Young Presidents Organization. We started with beer, pretzels and a tour of Situation Brewing. We visited Porc Sale to learn about the art of charcuterie and sausage-making with chef Mark Kalynchuk, nibbled on sweet delights from Amy Nachtigall at her newly opened Sugared and Spiced bakery and finished with…

Ready, set – SHOP. Time is of the essence. Callandra, our operations manager, and I had some meetings in Canmore today AND we managed to sneak in a little holiday shopping too. We are talented that way. What follows are some of the fun things we found. We hope these ideas will inspire you to…

Elk Island has 800 bison, 300 elk, 200 deer and about 1000 beavers in Canada’s only full fenced national park. The park is only a 30 minute drive from downtown Edmonton and is 194 square kilometres in size. One of our country’s oldest parks, early naturalists recognized the unique character of this land in what is known as the beaver hills. Formed by a collision of three glaciers, rolling hills and thousands of sloughs and ponds were left behind in this small district which is completely surrounded by Prairie otherwise. Our Edmonton Food Tours team – Karen Anderson, Liane Faulder, Cindy Lazarenko, Suzanne Dennis, Howard Kowalchuk and Debra Anzinger –  pulled in on a windless, 25 degree Celsius Saturday evening. It had been a dry summer so there were no mosquitos to pester and only the promise of a dinner laden…

There are some cities you just don’t want to miss. Chicago is one of them. From Thursday, October 12 to Monday October 16, 2017, Alberta Food Tours invites you to join our guide Liane Faulder as she travels with a small group of devoted food adventurers to experience one of the great eating – and entertainment – centers in the United States. Liane has been a writer with The Edmonton Journal for over 30 years and has led 10 previous culinary excursions across Canada, the United States and Europe. Chicago has been on her bucket list for a long time and Alberta Food Tours, Inc. president Karen Anderson has designed this itinerary after three research trips in 2015 and 2016. With some 2.7 million residents, Chicago is big enough to be home to a large number of innovative chefs experimenting with new…

Edmonton’s 104th Street is a magical place in the summer. With numerous cafes spilling out onto the sidewalk, it is a hot spot for people watching, while also offering the perfect opportunity to indulge in a range of high-quality food and drink. You can sip cocktails while sampling tapas at Tzin Wine and Tapas, relish a craft brew with poutine at Blue Plate Diner, or choose from a selection of Canadian and international cheeses at Cavern, paired with a glass of thoughtfully curated wine. Perhaps the best way to get a good sense of 104th Street is to visit the bustling City Market held every Saturday between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. between the May long weekend and Thanksgiving. Some 20,000 visitors will join you of a pleasant day. All of you will be able to pick up a great…