PARK Distillery Restaurant + Bar

The Maple Rye whisky that flavours the barbecue sauce on PARK's Campfire Ribs is distilled in the same building that serves them. That is the whole idea at PARK Distillery Restaurant + Bar, a working distillery and campfire-Canadian dining room on Banff Avenue where the spirits made on site keep showing up on the plate and not only in the glass. House Maple Rye sweetens the barbecue sauce; chili vodka spikes the rigatoni and the smoked tomato soup.

The kitchen runs on smoke and fire. The rotisserie turns out quarter and half chickens with slaw, cowboy potatoes, drippin's gravy and grilled lemon, and the Campfire Ribs come as a full rack under more of that Maple Rye barbecue sauce. The woodfired grill carries the bigger Alberta-beef orders: an eighteen-ounce bone-in Cowboy Ribeye, a ten-ounce striploin done as steak frites, and a twelve-ounce prime rib slow-roasted over light applewood smoke. The Mess Hall Standard loads a quarter chicken, half a rack of ribs, a char-grilled smokie, cowboy potatoes, broccolini and corn bread onto one board built for two. Burgers, bowls and salads fill out the rest — a Bison Burger with blueberry aioli, the vegetable-forward Backpacker Bowl, an Okanagan summer salad of stone fruit and whipped feta — but the centre of gravity stays at the fire.

What lifts the campfire premise above theme is what stands behind the spirits. The distillery hand-mills, hand-mashes and distills small batches in Banff, using water drawn from Rocky Mountain glaciers and grain from Alberta foothills farms. Those spirits loop back through the kitchen — Maple Rye in the barbecue sauce, chili vodka in the pasta and the soup — and onto the drinks list, where the Spirit of Banff flight pours Banff Whisky, Maple Rye, Alpine Dry Gin, Flora & Fauna Gin, Espresso Vodka and Vanilla Vodka side by side. A weekday happy hour opens the bar from three to five o'clock, and the distillery itself runs tours, so the spirits can be the reason for a visit rather than a footnote to dinner.

The bar treats those spirits as range rather than novelty. The Park Negroni leans on Alpine Dry Gin; the Skoki Maple Old Fashioned stacks Maple Rye and Banff Whisky under cacao and Angostura bitters; the Sawback runs chili vodka through pineapple and lime and comes out nitro-infused, as does a S'more Espresso Martini built on Espresso Vodka, Licor 43 and marshmallow foam. Mountain Joe, a cold-brew-and-vodka hard coffee, pours on draft or in a can. It is a list that reads like classic bar shapes rebuilt around what the stills next door actually make.

PARK opened in 2015, taking shape over roughly two years inside a former restaurant space on Banff Avenue. Co-founder Yannis Karlos is credited in local reporting as the company's president, and recent drinks coverage names Scott Coburn as master distiller, working with Alberta triticale and grain from Red Shed Malting. The build-out leaned hard into mountain references — cabin and campfire cues, mess-hall language on the menu, dishes named for backcountry huts and peaks.

The all-day hours and the Banff Avenue address make PARK easy to fold into a day in the park: a reserved table or a walk-in, a Spirit of Banff flight to start, ribs or rotisserie to follow, and a Smoked S'more finished tableside over smoking cedar. Reservations run through the restaurant's own booking page, with walk-ins welcome alongside them. The stills that supply the Maple Rye and the chili vodka sit a few steps from the dining room, close enough that the campfire on the plate and the spirit in the glass come from the same address.