Taken from My Favourite Restaurants in Calgary & Banff, 4th Edition
By John Gilchrist, CBC Radio Restaurant Critic
Escurial Incorporated
Page 21

Cafe Divine
Market-Fresh Cuisine

With all the development going on in Okotoks these days, it only makes sense that there will be some new restaurants popping up there. And some expansions to old ones. Cafe Divine has been around for a few years, but in early 2000 it relocated to a new and larger building on McRae Street, just east of downtown Okotoks. It's a large Victorian-style structure with a wraparound veranda, so it is hard to miss. It was built specifically for the cafe and has a large, open kitchen and a comfortable dining room. On a warm day, it's pleasure to relax on the veranda and dine on fine food.

The menu at Cafe Divine is a contemporary, market-fresh collection of things like smoked chicken sandwiches, seared salmon salads, thin-crusted pizzas, and mango-shrimp salad rolls. Nice ideas and great flavours.

The salad rolls we tried were huge. They lacked the tightness of Vietnamese salad rolls, tending to slide apart easily, but they were still tasty with their curried coconut-lime cream. And a soup of roasted squash with pumpkin seeds was rich, thick, and very squashy.

It was also huge. Whatever Cafe Divine does, they do in abundance and at reasonable prices. The soup was $4. The lamb shank braided in red wine - in other words, osso bucco - served both gnocchi and seasonal vegetables was $15.25. That’s a pretty good deal, and considering you get two shanks, it's even better. Though it was not the most complex osso bucco I’ve had, any fan of this dish will be quite happy.

Catherine's daily special of skewered chicken with a pile of vegetables was also well received. By the end of dinner, we were too stuffed to have any dessert, but l understand that Cafe Divine's huge pieces of apple pie are popular.

We visited Cafe Divine in their early days at the new location and were impressed. There were a few rough edges, but the talent and potential were obvious; even with the rough edges, the food was pretty interesting. The two young chefs at Cafe Divine have good ideas, they are committed to market-fresh food, and they want to prepare as much as possible themselves.

Folks in Okotoks should be proud of these young people for bringing such a dynamic concept to town. And for those of us in the city, it is definitely worth the drive.