Restaurants in Winnipeg

Hailing from India, Manoj Kumar, Roadhouse Eatery's owner and executive chef, prepares a multicuisine menu with North American, Indian, and Mediterranean leanings. In his eatery's spacious dining room, enrobed with vibrant primary colours and equipped for crowds with plenty of casual tables, plates of baby back ribs in housemade barbecue sauce rub elbows with piles of greek pasta, as well as healthful meals of curried chickpeas and French-inspired salad niçoise. After meals, diners can decompress with a game of pool in the lounge or sidle up to the bar where staffers pour wines, mix cocktails, and scold citrus fruit for trying to run away.

Many cafés get their gelato from powdered mixes that contain unhealthy hydrogenated oils and hard to pronounce chemicals such as carboxymethylcellulose. Mercato Gelato Café, however, gets its products from Mario’s Gelati, a company that’s been making gelato and sorbetto from scratch with fresh milk, cream, and fruit for more than 30 years. The café’s glass enclosures house 72 different flavours, including blackberry, mango, pistachio, tiramisu, and white-chocolate raspberry. Patrons also stop by for made-to-order gelato cakes, savoury desserts, and take-home gelato in 500-millilitre to 11.4-litre containers designed to share with a group of friends or one mildly hungry elephant.

At Darakeh, kebabs marinate for as long as 24 hours before they’re roasted over an open flame. This attention to detail—as well as large helpings of “glorious, buttery” basmati rice—helped Darakeh to make the _Winnipeg Free Press_’s 2011 list of best small restaurants in Winnipeg. In addition to the usual kebabs, chefs showcase less commonplace delicacies such as Persian-style beef stew seasoned with dried limes and fried eggplant blended with persian whey.

In 1964, brothers Leroy and Forrest Raffel banded together to come up with a new restaurant concept. Arby's took off almost immediately on the coattails of its hallmark roast-beef sandwich and the founders’ idea of providing customers with fast, quality food. Over the company's 48-year franchise history, its foundational pièce de résistance of thinly sliced, juicy beef has been served in a many permutations, and continues to be popular today, served at more than 3,500 stores in North America. Today’s menu still ignites appetites with traditional beef sandwiches, plus hot and seasoned curly fries, fresh-chopped salads, and desserts good for richly capping off meals or bribing any bridge trolls on the way home.

When the Godinez family opened the first La Bamba in Saskatoon in 2007, part of their impetus was the exhaustion of searching for the authentic bouquet of flavours that bursts forth in traditional Mexican dishes. "We were tired of trying restaurants that pretended to be Mexican," Juan Godinez says on La Bamba's website, "but were never [finding] the real flavours we were craving." Their solution was that first restaurant in Saskatoon, whose success has bloomed into a family of four Mexican eateries. When La Bamba Restaurant opened downtown with partner Edgar Rascon in 2012, the Winnipeg Free Press heralded its arrival, grouping it into a buzz-worthy trend of new restaurants popping up in the city centre. Today, the restaurant clings to its culinary roots by serving up homestyle enchiladas, chipotle-beef tacos, and chilaquiles, with gluten-free, vegetarian, and vegan options for those with dietary restrictions and those who firmly believe that they're stegosauruses.

Tea Story Cafe, a sophisticated café that got its start on Osborne Street, recently expanded into a second location on Corydon Avenue. There, baristas brew more than 120 varieties of loose-leaf tea, including fragrant rooibos, several types of pu'erh, and floral teas that bloom as they steep. Specialty lattes, fruit and vegetable smoothies, and bubble teas are also on the menu. Like Tea Story Cafe's original location, the Corydon Avenue space is sleek and stylish with midcentury furniture and an ultramodern chandelier.