Chef Pierre's Hot Dog Buns

One of the adventures in any new place is figuring out what of the necessities of life can be gotten, and where. This is true for any community (fabric choices in New York are much better than in Calgary!), but particularly true for smaller communities, and true in spades for smaller communities to which commodities must be trucked or flown significant distances. So it is true for Yellowknife - even though we need to bear in mind that compared to many other remote Canadian communities Yellowknife is a shopper's paradise.

Chef Pierre is by some measures a local legend in his many efforts to bring finer foods to the City. I have yet to meet him in person, or even to see him (I think), but already as a previous visitor I was in a number of his (since failed) establishments, and I currently enjoy those of his places which are still operating. You don't necessarily have to go to his businesses to get his products, however: one store selling his excellent breads is Shopper's Drug Mart (!).  Chef Pierre makes a classic Winnipeg Rye, a mean sourdough, and his Ciabatti buns are one of my special lunch treats, which I fill with his Arctic Char dip and enjoy very very very slowly. Tonight I had one of my semi-annual hankerings for hotdogs (and I knew there were two in the freezer), so I picked up Chef Pierre's Hot Dog buns at Shoppers. They lived up to the reputation - among the tastiest hot dog buns I've had.

One of Chef Pierre's current businesses is Le Stock Pot, a pared-down version of its previous iteration, (at the time a very ambitious deli-cum-upscale-kitchen-store). The smaller Stock Pot still sells those yummy Ciabattis and the char dip, but also very tasty looking dessert-type affairs which I have not yet tried, as well as sandwiches, quiches, meat pies and other "better" fast food. He owns one of Yellowknife's premier restaurants, Le Frolique; it hosts a rousing week-long celebration of Bastille Day in its outdoor courtyard (I could hear the music, June evenings, from my apartment).  And he caters - as the trucks say, in not quite perfect English: "We only get invited to the best parties!"

Another of his failed food businesses (which I saw on a previous visit) was a fantastic gourmet grocery store, on a scale which even a bigger city like Calgary was unable to sustain. (I remember the up-scale store in Market Mall which supplied the food for my 50th birthday and shortly thereafter went under). In Yellowknife the same location hosts another similar store, more sparsely stocked - I have heard tell (rumour only!) it's a "vanity store" by the mall's owner to give a struggling mall an anchor.  But you can get some pretty exotic cheeses there, and preserves and various sorts of spreads and crackers, olives - that sort of thing.

In the downtown "Loony Store" you can buy the usual gimcracks, but there's a small tucked-away corner close to the cash register where you can buy animal pelts (!) - seal, fox, rabbit, wolf, as well as a good selection of beads. A few doors down is Northern Transitions, a slightly upscale Northern souvenir store - it sells not only authentic parkas, but also various weights of wool by the meter if you should want to make your own. Again, in a corner tucked away, it sells an odd miscellany of fabric - cottons, linings, batting, canvas. And if you're still on the lookout for fabric (as I always am), if you walk through the chips, pop and chocolate bar section in the Sunline Alteration and Convenience Store you will come to a small section that similarly sells wool, canvas, buttons, zippers and the like.

Then there is Weaver and Devore (website worth exploring: Weaver and Devore), which is a "must see" on the tourist list. It is celebrating its 76th anniversary of being Yellowknife's "number one source for bush gear," and indeed, it does have about everything a northerner might need, and then some. A bug shirt? warm socks? parkas? chest waders? a Russian muskrat fur hat? classic Melmac dishes? suspenders? stovepipe? stoves?  - but don't stop there! how about a package of stroopwafels, those delicious Dutch cookies, or a roll of Dutch King peppermints? spices, perhaps? milk? pizza? That's in the grocery section that supplies some of the house-boat dwellers, other Old Towners, and folks from N'dilo.

Well - there are other stores, of course, but I'll leave them for another time. Suffice it to say that there's lots to be had here, if one knows where to look. And if it can't be - well, there will soon be a friend "making a run" down to Grande Prairie (the next big town, at 850 kms relatively close), or to Edmonton, or to other parts of Canada or the world. Chances are that friend will have a shopping list - even I had promised to buy some cheesecloth for a felting friend while in Ontario in August. And there's always mail order.

It's not so bad not having all the world's material goods at your fingertips. Makes you think a bit about whether you really need it or whether you could do without, or make do, or - in a pinch - check The Dump. Not so bad at all.