Restaurants in Penticton

The Wedding Café refreshes couples planning their big day with nuptial knowledge dished out alongside fair-trade organic coffee, salads, and paninis. The airy sky-blue-and-white dining room doubles as a resource centre where betrothed couples garner guidance from wedding planning books and magazines, browse brochures and reception-site menus, or connect to WiFi to run vows through plagiarism filters. As planners pour matcha green-tea lattes into mugs, they also dispense wedding advice, including referrals for trusted vendors.

Black café tables offer a calm space for planning ceremony details and finding the proper laser needed to cut the cake, but The Wedding Café dishes its fare out to non-planners just as joyfully. Paninis come equipped with accents such as cranberries or basil-pesto mayo to highlight chicken or turkey and complement a plate of Moroccan hummus with pita chips. Cupcakes, meanwhile, tap dance inside a glass display case, and wedding-themed merchandise waits to be gifted.

Though the Local Lounge • Grille’s 120-seat patio hovers over Lake Okanagan, the cuisine is close to the soil. Chef Paul Cecconi draws on locally grown ingredients for his menu of burgers, steaks, pastas, and seafood, which helped crown him the winner of the 2011 Ocean Wise Seafood Chowder Chowdown. Complex flourishes elevate classic dishes; Chef Cecconi adds a lavender glaze to beets and forms crispy falafel with chickpeas and Dungeness crab. Additionally, the eatery offers local craft beers and cocktails infused with Okanagan-made spirits.

Each table at Memphis Blues Barbeque House is set with bottles of barbecue and hot sauce and an entire roll of paper towels. You’ll need them—southern-style barbecue is messy, and owners George Siu and Park Heffelfinger encourage everyone to eat it the authentic way, with their hands.

Their recipes are authentic, too; the duo carefully studied and reproduced techniques from the World Barbecue Championship. The meat is smoked for several hours over hardwood at low temperatures, resulting in award-winning ribs, pork, and smoky yet tender beef brisket. Today, the restaurant operates out of six locations across British Columbia, and the owners hope to expand.