This Restaurant Uses So Much Butter and Cheese, Lactaid Is Literally on the Menu

From a Lactaid pill to cheese-covered everything, discover Calgary’s Francine’s and the city’s surprisingly rich food and drink scene.

I learned a lot of things about Calgary on my recent visit. Perhaps the most memorable came from Francine’s, a French Bar described as being in the heart of Calgary’s Historic Chinatown.

Right there on the menu at Francine’s, under the “En Plus” (sides/extras) section, nestled in between Confit Halibut Cheeks ($44.95 CAD) and Potato Purée ($9.95 CAD), was “A Lactaid Pill,” advertised for “market price.” We asked, and it turns out the going rate for a Lactaid in a fancy French restaurant these days is 25 Canadian cents. 

After looking more closely at the menu, the Lactaid began to make more sense. We indulged in “Cheesy Puffs,” a pair of enormous cheese puffs (they’re like a big dinner roll), doused in grated parmesan cheese, alongside a massive bowl of warm parmesan mousse sprinkled with a liberal helping of finely grated chives. Hells yes. It was to be either that or the Bayonne ham with honey butter chips and Comté cheese, and the melted bowl of cheese won the day. 

Even my summery tomato and stone fruit salad had cheese (it was a tangy house-made Boursin that I still dream about as I type). 

My main course was cheese-less, but not butter-less. The steak frites (when in Alberta, one must have at least some of the province’s vaunted beef) came doused in a tremendous toasted garlic peppercorn sauce (quite a bit more umami than the typical plain old brandy-peppercorn sauce the dish is famous for), and the triple-cooked fries were satisfyingly crunchy. 

We closed out the evening (sans Lactaid) with French toast, with a honey caramel glaze (bees in Calgary like to feast on the abundance of rapeseed flowers, which are used in the production of Canola oil), honey ice cream, and—you guessed it—cheese, in the form of a 15-month-aged Comté (the same one, I’ll wager, adorning the ham). 

There’s more to the story, however, than the butter-and-cheeseapalooza we encountered at Calgary’s most lactose-forward French eatery. We had just come directly from a delightful speakeasy, also in Chinatown, called Paper Lantern. Hidden behind a nondescript door in a basement elevator lobby, the place feels like something out of the ’70s, with kitschy wallpaper, a menu of comfort foods (pork belly skewers? spring rolls? bánh mì?) and inventive cocktails like my Morning in Hanoi, a delightfully evocative potable containing coffee-infused vodka, Kahlúa, condensed milk, coconut, banana, and pineapple—sort of like a boozy Vietnamese Bob Marley. 

This is all par for the course. Karen Anderson, founder of Alberta Food Tours, told me over a plate of ginger beef (there’s that Alberta beef again) at the Fairmont Palliser, the 1914 vintage hotel in the heart of the city. Some of Canada’s most well-known dishes and beverages were created in Calgary, she told me, including the ginger beef, a Chinese-Canadian dish of thinly sliced beef deep-fried in an egg batter, then tossed in a ginger-garlic sauce. 

I also finally tried Canada’s national cocktail, the Bloody Caesar, which is essentially a Bloody Mary made with Clamato juice (I broke my longstanding no-clam-juice-in-my-cocktails rule). For the unaware, Clamato is a spiced, sweetened tomato juice with just a hint of clam juice. The drink was invented in Calgary in the late 1960s after bartender Walter Chell traveled in Italy, tried spaghetti with clams and tomato sauce, and thought the flavor combination of clam and tomato would work well in a cocktail. Turns out he wasn’t wrong, and I could barely taste the clam. 

More recently in the world of booze, Alberta began allowing microbreweries and micro-distilleries 13 years ago, but the boom in small makers of beers and spirits is still booming. I chatted with Jordan Ramey at Burwood Distillery while I waited for some gin I was distilling as part of one of their classes. We also chatted about legislation introduced in Alberta’s provincial parliament that would provide a distinct legal definition of what could be marketed as “Alberta Whisky”–mainly requirements for it to be produced in the province with locally-grown materials and Alberta water. 

I certainly hadn’t expected my visit to be so food-forward (or indeed, at risk of overdoing it on dairy, but—again—cows), but I left confident that even if I did overdo it, at least one Calgary eatery would have the appropriate remedies in-stock, ready to go.