WHERE TO CATCH THE CALGARY VIBE

Smithbilt hats

The walls at Smithbilt are lined floor to ceiling with felt hats of every shape and colour (inset, below), both off-the-peg and customised. Its master hatter, Cody Harrison, says Smithbilt made several hats for Prince William and Kate to ensure a perfect fit. To get mine, he brings out a sinister device that he assures me is a hat mould.

“Locke and Co in London, the oldest hat shop in the world, would use one like this,” he says, before encasing my head within its weighty frame. Hey presto! It has replicated the exact contours of my skull. Harrison then uses that template to steam a white hat to my personal specifications.

If there for a fitting, take a behind-the-scenes tour. The pre-civil war equipment still in use will please history buffs, while the list of films the company has outfitted will appeal to cinephiles.

Tour £15pp (001 403 244 9131; smithbilthats.com)

Alberta Boot Company

You will, of course, need boots to match the hat – so follow in royal footsteps and head to the company that crafted boots for Prince Charles, William and Kate during their visits to Calgary. “Their staff sent over their measurements and the stitching patterns they liked – Kate requested tall boots,” says Federica Fiorotto, marketing manager at the Alberta Boot Company. Prince William’s pair, meanwhile, was made from exotic kangaroo and ostrich.

The company’s downtown showroom and factory smells deliciously of leather and hums with the sound of the 19thcentury machinery that is still used today. A customised pair of boots will set you back at least $725 (£426), but they will last a lifetime – and they are the real thing. Besides, if this year’s rodeo-themed Louis Vuitton menswear show is anything to go by, Western fashion will be trending to boot.

121 10 Avenue SE, Calgary (001 403 263 4623; albertaboot.ca)

Caesar’s Steakhouse

In the 1970s, suits did business over martini lunches at this lavish establishment of dark wood panelling and cherry-red leather seats (above). Today, the servers wear bow ties instead of togas as they used to (yes, really), but the juicy Alberta beef steaks are still cooked over an open-flame grill shaped like a Roman column. Despite the name, the restaurant neither invented the Caesar salad nor the Caesar cocktail, but it serves up a mean version of both. The salad is theatrically prepared tableside while the cocktail is a Calgary-invented melange of Clamato juice, Worcestershire sauce and vodka or gin – best drunk as a hair-of-the-dog hangover cure, but delicious any time of day.

512-4 Avenue SW, Calgary

(001 403 264 1222; caesarssteakhouse.com)

Palomino Smokehouse

A bar serving up succulent beef brisket alongside live music, the Palomino (below) is a Calgarian institution. Don’t miss the corn fritters and burnt ends (the crispy bits of the brisket in a Jack Daniels barbecue sauce); and if you are famished, order a “Fat Ass platter” – a bit of everything from the grill and smoker, with sides such as bacon-wrapped corn and Kentucky bourbon apples. Something tells me the Royals didn’t eat here – but they probably wanted to.

109 7 Avenue SW, Calgary (thepalomino.ca)

Music mile

Often referred to as “Nashville North”, Calgary’s music scene has been ramping up in recent years. There is no better way to take it in than a crawl down the music mile, a stretch of live music venues extending from the Blues Can – a bar housed in a cavernous metal shack – to the National Music Centre, a piece of world-class architecture housing Canada’s Music Hall of Fame. Cap it all off with a drink at The King Eddy, a 1905 former railway hotel that has seen many lives: once as a blues bar hosting the likes of Buddy Guy, then as low-rent housing and finally disassembled and rebuilt brick-by-brick by the National Music Centre as a hub for gigging musicians. With not much more than a spotlight and a mic, the stage lends itself to seriously raw performances. The Blues Can, 1429 9 Avenue

SE, Calgary (001 403 262 2666; info@thebluescan.com) ; The King Eddy, 438 9 Avenue SE, Calgary (001 403 829 6016; info@kingeddy.ca); National Music Centre, 850 4 Street

SE, Calgary (001 403 543 5115; info@studiobell.ca)