Bernadette's
104 Street
Bernadette's is a five-table room on downtown Edmonton's 104 Street, and one of the most singular restaurants in the province. Chef Scott Iserhoff, from Attawapiskat First Nation, and Svitlana Kravchuk built it as the first restaurant of their company Pei Pei Chei Ow, and it serves Indigenous-inspired sharing plates that carry real cultural weight — bannock, Saskatoon-berry brisket, raw elk, house-made sweetgrass ice cream — alongside natural wine and cocktails. A hand-painted mural anchors the intimate space. The cooking honours the chefs' grandmothers and the land in equal measure, and the result is elegant, personal and quietly political food that Edmonton has embraced as one of its hardest tables to book.
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MSSM
Downtown
MSSM brings a rarefied kind of sushi to Edmonton: an edomae-style omakase curated by Masaki Saito, whose Toronto restaurant held two Michelin stars, and executed at the counter by chefs he has trained. The menu changes with the seasons and the day's fish, much of it flown in from Japan, and the experience is deliberately close and quiet — a small room, real wasabi, a chef working within arm's reach and explaining each piece. It is the city's most exacting sushi by some distance, and the sort of restaurant that would draw notice in a much larger market. For Edmonton, its existence is a small statement of ambition, and it lives up to it.
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Olia
Jasper Avenue
Olia is Daniel Costa's return to fine Italian dining, the successor in spirit to his much-missed Corso 32 and Uccelino. On Jasper Avenue, behind an unassuming exterior, it serves handmade pasta and a menu of Italian dishes built on quality and simplicity, matched to an all-Italian wine list, with an affiliated cocktail bar next door. Costa is one of the chefs who taught Edmonton to take Italian cooking seriously, and Olia carries that lineage — refined without being stiff, generous without being heavy. It is the kind of grown-up, dependable dining room every city needs and few do this well, and it anchors the downtown stretch it sits on.
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