The Grizzly House

The fondue was never the plan. When Barbara and Peter Steiner opened The Grizzly House on Banff Avenue in 1967, the room was built for a different kind of night: touring bands, go-go dancers, and a telephone on every table so guests could ring each other across the floor. Alberta liquor law of the era required that a drinking establishment also serve food, and when the neighbouring kitchen that had been supplying it closed, the Steiners needed something they could run themselves. Fondue solved the problem. It never left, and nearly six decades on it defines the place — pots of Swiss cheese, hot stones, and a roster of game meats that no one else in town is cooking.

A meal here is built to unfold in courses. Cheese Fondue for Two — Swiss cheese loosened with wine and Kirsch, bread cubes for dipping — is the classic opening, the dish that reads the restaurant as a fondue house before anything else arrives. From there the kitchen turns toward the mountains. The Exotic Fondue Dinner is the clearest order in the building, a four-course spread built around game and oddity: a daily exotic fish, alligator, rattlesnake when available, ostrich, frogs legs, buffalo, and venison. The Hunter Fondue Dinner narrows the same idea to buffalo, wild boar, and venison, while the Fondue Neuchâtel and Bourguignonne hold the traditional Swiss and oil-cooked lines. Diners who would rather control the sear themselves order the hot rocks, where lobster, elk, ostrich, and steak cook tableside on heated stone. Chocolate fondue closes the meal the way cheese opened it.

For all the novelty, this is a fondue house first and a steakhouse second. Alberta strip and a seven-ounce elk tenderloin are there for anyone who wants a plate rather than a project, Buffalo Steak Tartar and Alberta Wild Game Sausage keep the game theme going for a first course, and Bagna Cauda, Raclette, and the cheese fondues give a lighter or meatless table somewhere to land. But the heart of the format is that almost everything is cooked at the table and shared, which makes the meal slow on purpose. You do not come to have a plate set in front of you. You come to spend an evening assembling one, course by course, with the people across the table — which is why it works best for a group, a celebration, or a return trip built around dinner rather than squeezed beside it.

The Grizzly House has stayed with the family that started it. Local reporting has described the restaurant as run by the Steiners' daughter Brigitte alongside Francis Hopkins, with much of the staff and kitchen carried forward rather than replaced — the kind of continuity a chain would have sanded off. When the restaurant passed fifty years, it registered locally as a Banff milestone rather than a quiet anniversary. The fondue bread comes from J.K. Bakery and the sausages from Valbella. The dining room itself has been left largely alone: wood panelling, carved bears, totem poles, a scatter of relics, seventies music, and the table phones, most of them still working, still there for anyone who wants to place a call across the floor.

None of it is subtle, and none of it is trying to be. Reservations are still taken by phone rather than a booking form — direct, in person, the way most things here are handled. The exotic fish changes by the day and the rattlesnake depends on the supplier, so the dinner a table gets is partly a matter of when they came. A fondue pot first lit for lack of a better option became the thing everyone remembers about the night, and the restaurant has spent the decades since refusing to tidy it up.