The Blue Dog cafe touts its authentically cool and untraditional wholesome food on its website, saying carnivores and vegetarians alike will enjoy their fare.

The Blue Dog opened in 1998, offering good soup and sandwiches. Through the years, the menu has expanded greatly and today you’ll find it artistically written out on a chalkboard. There’s a nice variety of healthy items available and they prepare just about everything in their restaurant in-house. There’s even good eats for kids of all ages, including peanut butter and jam sandwiches. The cafe is also licensed and make all the fancy coffees you’d expect.

Just by chance, we ordered a meat-free lunch and loved it. The special was a corn and cheese frittata with a choice of soup, salad or corn chips. A frittata is an Italian-style flat omelet that’s baked in a skillet. It was so good, accompanied by a light, fresh salad dressed in a dill yogurt dressing. Good coffee, too.

A healthy, filling and full-of-protein falafel pita served with Florentine soup was equally good. The soup was thick with potatoes and spinach. Everything was really fresh. That goes for everything here — tasty and freshly made. It all went down well with a cream soda from Grizzly Paw in Canmore.

Behaving for a change, we did not indulge in their homemade desserts. From past experience though, we can vouch for how yummy those are. Did we mention good coffee? The Blue Dog serves organic and fair trade coffee from Kicking Horse Coffee. Free refills are a nice bonus, particularly if you have time to stay and visit with friends and family in the cheerful, sunny room. It was full of moms, babies and grandparents. We had a lot of fun entertaining babies with our funny faces. There was a steady stream of people coming and going. It’s a bustling, busy place, but our food arrived quickly and the service was great.

This is a nice community restaurant with the work of local artists featured on the walls, a community board loaded up with info, reading material available and a computer for the use of their customers. The small, shady patio in the back is a nice spot, particularly for the lovely summer days coming up.

Authentic, great food in a warm, happy place is what the Blue Dog is all about.

The Blue Dog Cafe is located at 1213 7th Ave in Invermere and can be reached at 250-342-3814.