It’s a fun idea and timely too.
For the last few months, Edmonton’s No.1 viewpoint restaurant La Ronde at the top of the Chateau Lacombe Hotel has featured a Retro Thursday three-course menu.
On Wednesday, September 27, 2017, the Chateau Lacombe will celebrate its 50th anniversary. When the hotel’s doors opened in 1967, it was considered the best thing in Edmonton since sliced bread.
If you’d been a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed teenager taken by your family to dine at the swanky revolving La Ronde that first year, you may still be patronizing the famous restaurant today, only as the patriarch or matriarch of successive generations.
La Ronde wears the years well. It has been repeatedly renovated and, as a good, formal dining room, shows no signs of weariness. The outer ring with all the tables and lounge area soundlessly revolves as it has for 50 years, a full revolution taking in the downtown and the river valley every 88 minutes.
The Retro Thursday classic menu — $66 for three courses, with choice throughout — is a winner.
Retro Thursday at La Ronde has proven popular, and should continue at least through the winter season. I’d like to see the same attention given to the Caesar salad as per the entrees, and some exploration in the dessert department – something lighter but still of an age – lemon meringue pie?
As we left, Duran Duran’s Hungry Like A Wolf, circa 1982, was quietly playing in the background. Not quite a ’60s classic, but still 35 years old .. and topic appropriate!
From the Edmonton Sun