The pub crawl in Whitehorse the previous night was very unsuccessful – Whitehorse having little to no nightlife worth speaking about. (What nightlife it did have was crammed into an altogether uninteresting room filled with a wide variety of altogether uninteresting people.) The next morning we try something different in our investigation of Whitehorse: a café crawl.
We begin our morning at the Alpine Bakery, a good place to start, we think, remembering the small ad at the hostel promising a mug of coffee and scone or muffin for three dollars. Not that three dollars for a coffee and muffin is particularly inexpensive, but it seems about the right price for the kind of café I have craved since I left Peterborough, Ontario (where the café culture and nightlife are hard to beat for a city of under 100,000 people). A pleasant walk in the sunny morning cold to the northern side of the downtown core bring us to the Alpine Bakery sandwich board ad, pointing us to the bakery and café itself.
The Alpine Bakery is housed on the main floor of a log building beneath a large room upstairs which is used for yoga, among other things. The atmosphere inside looks just as promising. In two-thirds of the room there is a lively kitchen space, the remaining one-third left as a café sitting area. A display counter with baked goods separates the two spaces just enough to invite connection with food, yet section off a sitting area quiet enough for café contemplation. Colourful woven baskets hang from the ceiling and small round tables line the side wall along windows. The final table is tucked into a cozy corner where red brick and wooden walls meet. It is here we decide to sit. Behind us, a slow food movement poster from 2002 hangs with its message as relevant as ever, and New Internationalist magazines and cookbooks are piled on a small corner shelf. Their presence feels oddly unpretentious, even unintentional. The top of this pile features a copy of Zoe’s Windy Day by Barbara Reid and I start thinking about kids, and settling down. I forget about the uninspired nightlife and am now overwhelmed with a cozy feeling of home.
Sipping on the coffee brings me back to my own green beans and coffee roaster, still in Fox Lake where a good cup of coffee is otherwise a fading memory. The cranberry-grapefruit scone I had ordered is something different and delightful. The familiar and the novel dance and mingle in warm, creative conversation, as I speak to Curtis about how nice it would be to settle in Whitehorse. He is less impressed with his bagel, but as I review its hard crust and chewy texture, I try to explain to him that it, in fact, is a good bagel, and everything bagel-like he had tried prior was merely doughnut-shaped bread.
I leave the Alpine Bakery with my expectations high, but also with the certainty that it doesn’t get better than this.
$3.50 for a bagel and coffee. Visit the Alpine Bakery for a cozy and quiet atmosphere, quality organic food, and positive social change.
I didn’t know about that bakery … I will be sure to stop in next time I go thru Whitehorse.
as a yukon-er, and more specifically, a whitehorsian, born and raised, i was more than a little shocked to find someone calling the ‘horse’s night life “uninteresting” …not to mention the people?!
hmmmmm….. for the town in the country with the highest per capita bar to person ratio, you’d assume this not to be the case!
you needn’t walk more than 5 minutes in either direction of the corner of 1st and main and you’ll stumble upon bar after bar after bar after….bar, each with their own charm. from open mic wednesdays at flippers to live local dancin’ tunes saturday nights at the gold rush, or even, if you dig it, the club-esque style of coasters bar, there is, if one wishes to find ‘em, a wide selection of nightlife to be experienced in the capital city (population 20,000, need i remind you).
as for the “uninteresting people” goes, well, anyone who chooses to spend their life north of the 60th parallel where the sun goes down at 3:30pm and doesn’t rise again until 10am for months out of the long , cold winter, and barely sets for the remainder of the year, must have at least one or maybe even two interesting stories to tell, if you’d take the time to sit down, relax, tune into the slower, less caught up, more personal pace of ‘yukon time’ and listen.
i can’t imagine a place so beautiful, wild and inspiring could not, even in the slightest, rub off on the inhabitants.
as for the alpine bakery, i’m in much agreement that the beautiful breads and other goodies including homemade chocolates, hearty soups and fantastic smoothies blended with locally picked cranberries, is indeed a jewel for the spirit and the taste buds.
if you’re ever back in the ‘horse, i offer to take you out, show you around and introduce you to the people who make me so proud to call whitehorse my home.
:-)
I think you’re right, for the most part. I’ve actually lived in Whitehorse for about a year now and I do consider it one of the most beautiful places in Canada, and now my home as well. My comment about the nightlife is highly subjective, and I took much creative license in my description of it (perhaps too much :) ). I was looking for a particular kind of pub/night cafe that I was used to in Peterborough – a small, intimate setting with some live music that doesn’t interrupt conversation – a place where it’s okay to grab a coffee and a cookie instead of a beer. So my description was misleading in that I was more interested in a licensed cafe than a pub/bar per se.
Since living in Whitehorse (and since writing this post), I have discovered numerous other cafes – and I have been delighted with their food, atmosphere, and people. But I still wish they wouldn’t close so early :). I actually wonder if the revised liquor laws will help things.
Thanks for your comments!