A Taste of Calgary with Anna Olson

🎟️ Event Review

📍 Quick Facts
• Event Type: Celebrity Chef Presentation & Cooking Demonstration
• Location: Stampede Kitchen, BMO Centre, 20 Roundup Way SE, Calgary, AB
• Duration: Evening event
• Ticket Info: $90 per person; advance tickets required

After seeing the promotion for Taste of Calgary’s Prairie Table with Anna Olson, we were pretty excited. At $90 per person, we were expecting a premium evening that felt a little special—recipes, cooking tips, a tasting experience, a meet-and-greet with Anna Olson, and ‘insights into Anna’s world of baking and entertaining’. It sounded like the makings of an awesome night.

The event was held in the Stampede Kitchen inside BMO Centre, which was a bit of a surprise. It had been pitched as an ‘intimate evening’, so we were expecting something more intimate and culinary-focused, but instead we found ourselves in a large event space on the edge of the noisy and chaotic Stampede market. To make the setting even more unusual, right next to us was a vendor selling, of all things, mops. Nothing says premium celebrity chef experience quite like being alongside the crowd shopping for floor-cleaning supplies.

To boot, only two rows of this area were reserved seating for ticket holders. You could sit in the third row and get the same ‘masterclass’ (without the wine and food samples) for free.

The presentation itself was pleasant enough, but the recipes and cooking tips felt pretty pedestrian. There wasn’t much that felt new or particularly inspiring, especially for anyone who already spends a fair amount of time in the kitchen. I kept waiting for that little bit of Anna Olson magic that would make the evening feel worth the ticket price, but it never quite arrived.

Anna demonstrated, and we sampled three dishes that evening: butter tarts, savoury sausage squares with a bacon weave base, and a pho-inspired beef carpaccio. The samples were plentiful, but none of them felt particularly worthy of a ‘masterclass’. It felt like the kind of food samples you could get for free at Costco or a farmers’ market.

It was also really frustrating when we realized people were casually walking in through the side entrance from the general Stampede floor and getting the same samples for free—while we had paid $90 each to get them.

The ‘meet-and-greet’ was another disappointment. It turned out to be little more than a book sale and signing. We didn’t find Anna particularly warm or engaging during the evening. It was polite and professional, but the interaction felt more like a scheduled business appearance than a genuine opportunity to connect with the fans who had paid to be there.

When we signed up, we were also offered a $15 bar credit, which sounded like a nice little bonus. Unfortunately, at the event we found that the only non-alcoholic option was beer, and we were told that we couldn’t use vouchers for it. The vouchers could only be used for sparkling wine, and for an event with a $90 ticket price point, that was pretty disappointing. We bought our own beer.

What really made us question the value of the evening, though, was the free afternoon ‘Anna Olson Gives Lemon a Twist Today’ session. There was no fee to attend that presentation, yet much of the content felt remarkably similar to what we had paid $90 per person to hear that evening. The only real difference was the guaranteed sample. That left us wondering exactly what made the Prairie Table experience worth the premium.

The biggest issue for me was that the marketing promised one experience, while the reality felt like something quite different. Taste of Calgary did a great job promoting the event and creating excitement around it, but the evening didn’t match those expectations. Unfortunately, the promotion set the bar much higher than the experience could clear.

There was nothing wrong with spending an evening listening to Anna Olson talk about food. The problem was that, for $90 per person, we were expecting something that felt special from beginning to end. Instead, we got a fairly ordinary presentation, a couple of samples and a glass of wine, while people from the general show floor could wander in and get much of the same experience for free.

One woman sitting next to us summed up the whole evening perfectly: ‘We just paid $90 for a butter tart and a glass of wine.’

Honestly, I couldn’t argue with her.

Taste of Calgary with Anna Olson was advertised as a live masterclass, but it delivered more like a basic cooking class.

📋 Review Note

Document Only: This experience falls outside our scoring range. In keeping with our review policy, we’re documenting our experience without assigning a numerical rating.