Walter's Dining Room (Jasper, CANADA) ★★☆☆☆

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Walter's Dining Room (Jasper, CANADA) ★★☆☆☆

Walter's Dining Room at the 4-star Sawridge Inn prides itself as a rare First Nation owned hotel restaurant in the heart of Jasper. The award winning team puts strong emphasis on the use of regional and environmental friendly ingredients in preparing a wide selection of Canadian inspired dishes highlighted by First Nation nuances.

We drove in from Edmonton and by the time we arrived at Sawridge Inn, it was almost 8:30pm. Tired and starved, we quickly checked in and looked for a place to fill our belly.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that the hotel's fine dining restaurant, Walter's Dining Room was still open. Apart from the extensive food menu, we were also attracted by the unique ambiance that features a sky-lit atrium setting and giant 3-storey fireplace.

The lush atrium of greenery provided a very cozy environment for casual dining.

The restaurant offers a good selection of wine from different regions in the country.

We decided to start things off with something inspired by the native heritage - the Three Sisters' soup. The Three Sisters often refers to the combination of corn, green beans and squash (here they used butternut squash) which were traditionally harvested by many American Indian tribes.

They also added some potatoes, pork hock and bannock to enrich this stew-like soup (3.5/10).

Next was a bowl of PEI mussels cooked with lemongrass coconut curry. We found the seasoning to be a little on the light side (3/10).

Our last appetizer featured the "Dialogue of salmon" that comprised of salmons done in three different ways - hot smoked, gravlax and candied.

This was a slightly more sophisticated dish comparing to the previous two starters but unfortunately we found the interpretation to be rather underwhelming (1/10).

For my main course, I had the black truffle sacchetti pasta. Stuffed sacchetti pasta was nicely cooked with some roasted garlic, black truffle, white wine crème, parmesan and chili oil.

I really came to enjoy the sauce and their work with the seasoning but perhaps the sacchetti pasta was a bit overcooked leaving a slightly unpleasant texture. The presentation also could have been a lot better (3.5/10).

We finally came down to our last main course - Maple whiskey prawns. Fresh prawns were
flambéed with Canadian maple whiskey and then served with crème and assorted vegetables (4/10).

Jasper National Park is home to a large population of wildlife including caribou seen here in the picture below.

It also possesses some of the most breathtaking scenery of mountains, lakes and glaciers in the Canadian Rockies. This memorable journey will definitely be remembered forever.