Dracul Van Helsing

Life Should Taste As Good As Swiss Chalet

April 4, 2012 at 9:55 pm (Personal essays) (family, life, rotisserie chicken, Swiss Chalet restaurants)

Life should taste as good as Swiss Chalet was a slogan for a Canadian TV commercial popular back in the early years of the last decade.

Swiss Chalet is a chain of restaurants in Canada that specialize in making Swiss style rotisserie chicken.

My dad and I loved to eat there.

There was a Swiss Chalet restaurant in Edmonton’s Capilano district which was close to the hamlet of Sherwood Park where my dad and I used to live.

Throughout the 1990s and the early part of the last decade, we used to visit there every Thursday night.

We used to get the rotisserie style quarter chicken and baked potato which also came with Swiss Chalet’s mouthwatering secret recipe gravy not to mention a home made dinner bun.

The taste of the chicken was heavenly, the gravy was out of this world and the Swiss Chalet baked potato always seemed to taste better than most restaurants’ baked potatoes.

Then about 10 years ago, the Canadian Tire store (Canadian Tire is a department store in Canada- it sells more than just tires) which was the anchor of the shopping center where this particular Swiss Chalet was located- it closed. A few months later, this Swiss Chalet which lost most of its customers (save for my dad and me) closed as well.

How my dad and I missed that Swiss Chalet. It had an upper dining area which had a huge photo of the Swiss Alps that covered three walls. That was where my dad and I used to sit and imagine that we were in a Swiss chalet in the Swiss alps eating Swiss style rotisserie chicken.

A Swiss Chalet restaurant did open later in Sherwood Park where my dad and I lived but it was poorly managed and the food wasn’t as good.

One evening back in 2008, my dad and I had to wait an hour and a half to get our meal (Swiss Chalet prided itself on getting its meals out to customers within 15 minutes) and when the meal arrived- it was poorly cooked.

My dad and I never went back.

And most of Edmonton’s other Swiss Chalet restaurants were in the west side of the city- a good hour’s drive from Sherwood Park (the Anthony Henday roundabout hadn’t been built in those days).

Then of course 22 months ago my dad died from cancer.

Today I was in a grocery store in downtown Edmonton and a new sit down Swiss Chalet had opened (before it had been only a take-out place).

So I went there tonight.

The quarter rotisserie chicken, the gravy, the baked potato and the dinner bun were as good as I remember from the meals my dad and I had in the Capilano Swiss Chalet.

So it was like old times again.

And in a certain sense, I seemed to feel my dad’s presence again.

Life should taste as good as Swiss Chalet- that old slogan went.

And when my dad was alive- life did taste as good as Swiss Chalet.

Maybe when my dad’s estate is finally and completely and totally settled and the funds from it are finally dispersed between my sister and me and I move to Vancouver where I now want to live- then again maybe life will taste as good as Swiss Chalet.

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