Tooloulous

Crawfish buckets and seafood boils are bayou food, which makes downtown Banff — landlocked and alpine, a long way from the Gulf — an unlikely place to find them done properly. Tooloulou's treats that distance as the whole idea. The kitchen runs Cajun and Creole first, seafood close behind, with a Rocky Mountain inflection around the edges, and it does the work from breakfast through dinner rather than as a themed dinner act. What lands on the plate is Louisiana cooking built from scratch, a block off Banff Avenue.

The two dishes that define the kitchen both work by combination rather than by a single sauced centre. Taste of N'Awlins is a compact tour of the house — Creole jambalaya, shrimp and lobster etouffee, and seafood sausage gumbo in one order, all over Cajun dirty rice — so a first-time table can read the whole Louisiana vocabulary in a sitting. Shrimp & Grits Ya Ya does something similar with Southern comfort: fried green tomatoes, cheesy garlic grits, and spicy Cajun jumbo shrimp pulling in the same direction at once. Neither treats Cajun-Creole as shorthand. Both ask the kitchen to hold several preparations together on one plate, which is the more demanding version of the style and the reason these two anchor the menu.

From there the menu spreads out. Dinner leans communal: a Full Crawfish Bucket brings three pounds of crawfish with corn cobs, potatoes, dirty rice, and sweet cornbread, and the Shrimp and Crab Boil piles snow crab legs, shell-on shrimp, spicy sausage, corn, and hushpuppies out for the table to work through. Around the boils sit blackened snapper under mango salsa, a seafood skillet finished with bordelaise and parmesan, house-made crab cakes, and a shrimp po'boy on grilled baguette. Dessert stays in the same idiom — Bananas Foster flamed in rum butter over vanilla ice cream, a tangy key lime pie — so a full dinner never has to leave the Louisiana thread to finish.

What separates all of this from a seafood menu with Cajun seasoning is the pantry behind it. The house makes its own sauces, soups, dips, spice blends, gumbo, etouffee, jambalaya, and bisque, and keeps a shelf of more than one hundred hot sauces on hand. That detail is the tell that the framing is structural rather than styling: a plate like Taste of N'Awlins only holds together if the sauces underneath it are made in-house, and Tooloulou's has built its identity on exactly that work.

The cooking has real time behind it. Steve Smythe owns the kitchen and runs it as chef; he earned his Red Seal in 1981 and has cooked in Banff kitchens for more than forty years. Catherine Sinclair Smythe and Caeleigh Smythe round out a family operation, and the fifty-seat dining room takes dinner reservations rather than trading on walk-up turnover. Tooloulou's opened downtown in October 2012, which makes the Cajun-Creole lane less a trend bet than a long-held conviction — a cook who knows the town deciding Banff could use a proper Louisiana table.

That range is the point. Breakfast opens the day — a crab-and-asparagus omelette, the Sizzling Rivalry benny stacking crabmeat and spicy shrimp under Hollandaise, a Belgian waffle under berry coulis — and the kitchen carries through lunch and dinner without going dark in between. A daily happy hour from three to five brings the Hurricane and fried green tomatoes within reach of a shorter stop, and the weekend Benny special, a BLT benny with a glass of strawberry prosecco, gives regulars a reason to come before dinner service. The crawfish buckets and boils are the loudest orders on the menu, but the morning benedicts and the late-afternoon happy hour are what keep Tooloulou's busy from the first pot of coffee to the last dinner seating.