A is for: Avenue Diner

Stephen Avenue on a Saturday morning is a sleepy place. The detritus of Friday night lies crumpled in various corners, and the odd store employee, coffee in hand, hurries to work. It’s surprisingly quiet, as if downtown has been closed for the weekend and everyone’s chilling out on their backyard decks or headed to the mountains.
Until you step inside Avenue Diner.

If it is possible to step in, that is. Often, a waiting crowd fills the small lobby and spills out onto the street. Every one of the 60 seats is full and hungry people must wait their turn for Avenue’s hearty take on “modern comfort food” because, unless you’re part of a group, Avenue doesn’t take reservations. It doesn’t usually take long to get a seat, though. Tables turn fairly quickly, but with the scent of bacon in the air, each breath can be an eternity. We see why some choose to wait outside.

We don’t often head to crowded restaurants that don’t take reservations. Call us picky, but we want to eat when we want to eat. But Avenue is a diner, after all, and reservations aren’t really part of the diner mix. And Avenue is worth the wait.

It looks like a diner, too. Long and narrow, less than four metres wide in the upper dining area, it’s reminiscent of the old railway dining cars that were turned into stationary diners in decades past. But instead of stainless steel walls and vinyl-clad twirly stools along the counter, Avenue is blessed with quarried sandstone and metal tractor-seat stools, which give it a diner-for-the-prairies tone.

So what does a diner-for-the-prairies serve? How about maple-fried steel-cut oatmeal with vanillabean cream and homemade lemon curd for breakfast, or bananas Foster French toast with spiced rum butter? Or a fontina-cheddar-brie grilled-cheese sandwich, or a grilled salmon club sandwich with capicollo and lemon-caper mayo for lunch? Or meatloaf or corned beef hash or at least three kinds of eggs Benedict? All made from as many local, seasonal ingredients as possible, and all topping out at $18 — that’s for the AAA Angus steak with two eggs, Yukon Gold hash and toast. That’s good eating.

And there are daily specials, too. On a recent visit, we were drawn to a daily special of “biscuits and gravy” eggs Benedict served with cheddar-thyme biscuits and sausage-mushroom pan gravy; perhaps not the healthiest choice on the menu, but it sure tasted good.

That Benny is just the kind of dish Avenue owner Heather Chell loves. Chell expounds on the aged cheddar mac and cheese, and on all the bacony treats on the menu (the mac and cheese is her dad’s recipe). But although Chell talks the diner talk, she doesn’t walk the old-style diner walk. The stylish, smiling, diminutive Chell looks more likely to be the proprietor of a trendy, contemporary wine bar than of a diner.

Chell admits she hadn’t planned on opening a diner when she leased the Stephen Avenue property in 2003, but it was the space itself that dictated the style. When sandstone and bricks were revealed during renovations of the 1898-vintage structure, the look demanded a kind of comfort food that would be as at home a century ago as it is today.

Chell adds the building’s prairie bones called for food that was laden with quality and value, and not pretensions. The fact the room is also long and narrow made her think of diners, so a diner it became, albeit one with tractor-seat stools — a nod to the farmers and farmland around Calgary — along the counter.

From breakfast through lunch, Avenue staff cruise from the one end of the diner to the other, hauling huge plates from the kitchen to customers seated on either side of a narrow aisle. True to diner form, they are unfailingly polite and helpful, quick to refill coffee cups and offer menu suggestions. They’re a pleasant lot, skilled at helping clear the early-morning clouds that befuddle our pre-caffeine minds. And they’re speedy at clearing tables to bring on the next round of hungry customers.

On many days, Chell herself will be everywhere, slinging coffee and waffles with the best of them, donning whites if the cooks need a hand and even rolling up her sleeves if there are dishes to be washed.  

That’s how it works in the diner world. It may be sleepy and quiet outside, but inside Avenue Diner, the action never stops.

Avenue Diner is located at 105 Stephen (8th) Avenue S.W., 403-263-2673.