Like the Banff Springs Hotel dinner menus, this one features eight table d’hôte entrées, but unlike the Banff menus, only five of the eight are hot meals. Where the Banff menu had fourteen a la carte entrées (18 with cold plates), this one has just eight (twelve with cold plates). The Lake Louise menu also has fewer desserts.
Click image to download a 1.8-MB PDF of this menu..
The cover shows the Kicking Horse River, just over the Continental Divide from Lake Louise. At the divide, a large sign visible from the train pointed out Divide Creek, which split with one branch joining the Kicking Horse and heading to the Pacific and the other branch turning east and reaching the Bow River and eventually Hudson Bay. I once suspected this was something set up for the tourists by Canadian Pacific engineers, but such creek divides are not unusual, and a similar continental divide creek can be found in Wyoming.
But they had one heck of a selection of cheese back then. Is a lamb fed sugar beets (which means the crushed up leftovers after the sugar has been extracted) tastier than one fed, say, grass…or milk? Maybe they knew the answer in 1949 but it doesn’t sound appetizing to me. I notice that almost everything on the ala carte side had a prep time listed, including 10 minutes for tomato soup. Seems like a long time to ladle out some soup. I guess Canadians back then had important things to do and didn’t want to waste time waiting for soup.
Jim