Alberta’s food scene is as wild as our backcountry, but Fireside Highway 41 Roadhouse Bar and Grill in Czar takes good grub to the next level.
Sitting cozy in Czar, a small village of 200 people just 70 kilometres from the Saskatchewan border, the diner is a popular attraction among locals and tourists alike.
Fireside serves the comfort foods you know and love like some of the best homemade pizza, wings, and burgers. But the diner’s true nature is revealed upon closer inspection of the menu.
If you have ever wanted to try exotic foods without travelling, then Fireside is the diner for you.
At Fireside, your tastebuds can enjoy delicious frog, elk, stag, kangaroo, ostrich, and alligator meat without having to leave the province. Pretty wild, right?
However, Fireside’s popularity wasn’t earned off of the novelty of its menu alone. The diner’s food preparation is second to none and will have your primal instincts eager to take a bite.
The diner’s Facebook page has almost 100 hundred reviews, most of which are positive, earning the roadhouse a 4.8-star rating.
“Home-cooked deliciousness, great portions, great prices, great service,” wrote Laurie Reimer, a patron of Fireside, on the diner’s Facebook page.
The diner’s Noah’s Ark burger lets customers create a burger using three meats of their choice.
Fireside’s variety of exotic meat paired with its small-town charm make it an Albertan favourite.
Bang For Your Buck
Reimer wasn’t kidding about the great prices. Northfork Bison, a Canadian distributor of bison and game meat, sells eight pounds of ground kangaroo meat for just under $160, or about $20 for one pound.
If Fireside’s kangaroo burger is the same size as its classic beef hamburger, that would make it seven ounces, which is about $8.75 per patty based on Northfork’s pricing.
Restaurants typically mark up their food prices by roughly three times the wholesale price. If Fireside marked up the cost of just its kangaroo burger patty, it would cost $26.25.
However, the diner charges a flat rate of $22 for all of its game meat burgers, which come with your choice of fries, salad, or soup.
A flat rate of $22 for all of Fireside’s game meat burgers is generous considering some meats are more expensive than others.
For example, Caudle’s Catch Seafood sells one pound of alligator meat for $30, or just over $13 for seven ounces. After a 300 percent markup, that’s a price tag of almost $40 for just the patty.
If Fireside’s food and prices have caught your attention but the diner is too far for you, there are other restaurants worth checking out like Normand’s in Edmonton.
The quaint restaurant is known for its wild game menu offered in November and October. The menu offers a variety of meats including muskox, caribou, and fish like the Arctic char.
The restaurant’s chef Cui Kouch’s favourite dish is braised Alberta boar shanks with roasted red peppers, honey, whiskey, and black peppercorn.
If you are looking for a charming small-town dinner, Fireside is your best bet. For finer dining, Normand’s is the spot.
There’s no shortage of great restaurants (see our guide here) and wholesalers offering game meat for decent prices in Alberta, just be careful who you buy from.
On The Hunt For Meat
Licensed hunters can butcher the animals they kill and share the meat with family and friends but it is illegal to sell the meat under the Wildlife Act and Regulation. But not everyone plays by the rules.
Last year, Edmonton police and animal control officers rounded up several live goats from a rented garage in the Kensington neighbourhood and found evidence that the animals were being slaughtered there.
“There were goat parts everywhere. Blood on the wall…I’ve worked on a pig farm, and it never looked like that,” Jon Bos, the residence’s neighbour, told CBC News.
When CBC contacted the man who had been renting the garage, he told them that he was slaughtering the animals for friends who had purchased them from farms to get around high commercial prices.
Meat needs to be inspected by the Alberta government’s meat and dairy inspection system that is in place to ensure food safety and animal welfare regulations are being met.
However, uninspected meat, like the meat being distributed by the man in Kensington, sells for much cheaper than your standard butcher or grocery store.
According to Ron Wiebe, an agriculture inspection and investigations manager for southern Alberta, uninspected beef sells for less than half the cost of federally or provincially inspected meat.
While that might sound like a sweet deal, purchasing uninspected meat comes with risks.
Lynn McMullen, a meat microbiologist and professor at the University of Alberta, claims diseases carried by animals are the main risk posed by uninspected meat.
“Inspection is to make sure that the animals that we’re slaughtering and harvesting meat from are healthy so that we don’t get animal diseases in the food supply,” McMullen told the Calgary Herald.
Inspection is mandatory for all kinds of meat, including game meat. In 2014, a wild meat and fish trafficking ring in central Alberta.
Officers seized over 320 packages of moose and elk meat, worth about $6,500. Whether you’re looking for a cheap cut of steak or exotic game meat, stick to inspected sources like restaurants.
Local businesses like Fireside and Normand’s will thank you for your business and you get to enjoy a quality meal to boot.
