“Sukiyaki” is a food court find, and Caffe Artigiano has a new home (?)

I went for a nice long walk yesterday while Brian was still in the throes of US Open overdosing. I found out that I could more or less plot my route and find the distance I walked here. Very cool! I walked more than 5 miles.

I ate lunch en route at the unremarkable food court at the Calgary Eaton Centre, which is mostly chain-y dreck (Subway, Quizno’s, Taco Bell, etc), but it has one of the few Calgary locations of Montreal-based Thai Express, which has pretty fair Thai, but the smiling face and the, well, pleading of the woman behind the counter at Sukiyaki (no website, but the same franchiser as Thai Express manages theirs- along with a lot of familiar food-court product in Canada, like Veggierama and Yogen Fruz) compelled me to take a look at what they had on offer there. I noticed that the customer who’d just been served had a heaping, and I mean heaping, bowl of something that looked completely delicious, so I decided to give this place a shot. I asked what the last customer had ordered. “Chicken noodle soup.” Sounds good, one chicken noodle soup, please. “Spicy?” Yes, please.

The smiling PBTC proceeded to take a big styro take-out bowl, the kinds with straight sides that hold a lot, put into it an ample helping of bean sprouts, rice noodles from a noodle cooker (the “baths” that some Asian places use to cook single orders of noodles in those metal conical baskets) , some thinly sliced raw onion, cilantro, and broccoli, and (since I asked for spicy) some pepper sauce; this all she doused with piping-hot broth of some origin, and she topped the whole beautiful mess with chopped, cooked chicken. It’s not pho; the noodles were thicker and cylindrical and pre-cooked, but it was reminiscent of pho. Here is the soup after a little stir-stir by me at my table:

It was excellent. Rich, flavourful broth, nice balance of starch and protein, a really great surprise from a place that’s in pretty much every food court in town.

I actually took this walk for the exercise, since my ability to walk last week was hampered by my hunkering down to get my SSHRC grant application done (mission accomplished!), but in addition I read this tantalizing piece from “Urban Mixer” about how Caffe Artigiano is opening here in October at “6th Avenue and 3rd Street SW.” I had to check this out and see if any signs were posted or anything like that… well, no such luck, but I’ve deduced that the location must be in the new, beautiful (BEAUTIFUL) Centrium Place building at that corner. This is a rendering from PCL (the construction company) but it looks, if anything, better in real life:

So in the midst of good coffee times, we look forward to even better coffee times.