Bamboo Garden

The food here was decent – if you’re looking for some basic Asian food in Banff, I think this place is great for that. It’s relatively priced ($ 10-​$ 15), and service is fast. It was great to eat the food after a long day of hiking in Banff! Just know it’s on the second floor, so it’s kind of hard to find at first.

What kind of restaurant specializes in Thai food and yet doesn’t serve Tom Ka Gai soup? Answer: Bamboo Garden. Thankfully they had Tom Yum soup.
This is one of those Asian restaurants that tries hard to be too many things. It tries to serve Chinese food, Thai food, and Malaysian food and just about any other type of Asian food you can think of. Just don’t ask for Tom Ka Gai.
The restaurant is located on the second floor of a building on Banff Avenue. While climbing the stairs I thought to myself «Where the hell am I going?» because the stairwell looked a little shady. The interior is somewhat large and very plain. It’s got zero piz-​zazz.
While visiting there was a large group of Asian tourists (likely from a bus tour). I wonder what they thought of this place.
O yea, the Tom Yum soup wasn’t very good.

Not so impressed! Had to sit on table without water for about 10 min and then rescuers was cooked in too much coconut milk! Not recommended

I got the coconut rice and vegetable fried won tons with a Green Coconut drink. The food was off the charts, the staff were very accommodating as we asked if we could pull 2 tables together so we could sit along the railing and get a better view of the mountains.
One girl behind me said it best, «If I was sad and I was eating this food… I would just not be sad while eating this food.»

Awful!
Ordered a pad see ew with chicken and thai fried rice. Were both so disgusting that I just paid and left. such a waste of 30 bucks.
Ew.

First and most important thing, tell them you have a reservation regardless this place being empty! Because the servers are super confused and will turn you away even if there are 20 available tables, I kid you not. While I was, at least four groups were turned away for no reason, I guess they do not work for tips. Food is just your average fried rice, spring roll type of Chinese joint, don’t expect anything spectacular. And if your luck runs out when a tour group hits, expect extended delays and no service for a bit. Had the crispy chicken, not salted, spicy prawns with canned bamboo shoots, all you taste is the canned food. String bean was tough, one good news though, ma po spicy tofu is tasty and bits of ground pork and the sauce is excellent on top of white rice, yeah the tofu is all that’s left.

The carpet really bothers me the entire dinner, it doesnt look clean at all! Other than that, the food is nothing special, I wasn’t expecting too much on the Americanized Chinese food. I doubt their claimed on no MSG on their menu is true, had to chug half gallon of water after…

I don’t even know where to start with all the terrible things about this restaurant, but here are a few key things to know:
1) Food — the food either tasted terrible or had no taste. We ordered beef and broccoli, spicy noodles, string beans, a «hot pot» and seafood stir fry as entrees. Also ordered a mango salad starter. All were awful. Half the dishes did not even remotely match the description or the flavor. Hands down some of the worst food I’ve ever had. Even the cheapest Chinese take out tastes better. Also, this is advertised as a «Thai» restaurant… however, it’s actually just owned by Chinese people — however, neither the Thai nor Chinese dishes tasted good.
2) Price — expensive! Our $ 8 mango salad was literally one bite of salad and even less mango. Other entrees were $ 15+ and not even remotely worth it.
3) Ambiance — do not expect a nice atmosphere. When you walk in, there are empty beer bottles lying around in boxes. The main dining room also has nothing redeeming about it.
4) Service — extremely slow. There were tables that arrived later that got their food before ours.
One positive thing was our waitress was very sweet. I honestly felt bad for her because she actually did seem like she was trying to provide good service.
In summary, this is not worth your time or money. We’ve had several great meals in Banff after our experience at Bamboo Garden.

Absolutely delicious Thai food here. I’m a huge fan of pad thai and pad see ew and I gotta say that both tasted great! There’s a lot of flavor in their dishes and it was very satisfying. It is a little pricey, but the portion is pretty big so it evens out. They definitely need more workers because there were basically two people running around doing everything.

Amazing service, they kept the place open way past closing for our group and wow was the food great. We ordered almost all on the menu and everything came back perfect.
We ordered
Chicken pad Thai
Chicken wonton
Tom yum
Curry chicken
Red curry
Black pepper steak
Basil fried rice
Fried banana
And so much more. Other Thai places in town were not even close

If you like coconut in your curry, you will love this. Their food is delicious, the view is amazing, and desserts are gorgeous. I was particularly impressed with the food presentation (wish I had taken pictures)
The restaurant is definitely understaffed. But the waitresses remain polite, in a hurried sort of way. There was no wait time for food. Place was nice and clean.
You should eat here.

The restaurant is so huge, yet they are sooo understaffed! There are about 5 waitresses running around trying to serve approx 150 people, so the waitresses were forced to tell each customer that their food would take 30 – 40 min to arrive. We came in at 7 pm, didn’t get our orders in to 7:30, and didn’t get our food till 8:10. On top of that, it was the WRONG ORDER. Management needs to hire more help ASAP because their restaurant is too huge for only a couple girls trying to accommodate a full house.

Authentic tasty Thai food. Ordered a coconut seafood soup, a pad Thai, and a veggie stir-​fry side order. Yummy! Best food so far in Banff!

Amazing food
Great ambience
Service is awesome and the staff is very friendly…
A MUST must visit to this small hidden gem!!!

Always a good time at Bamboo Garden, the food is always amazing!

Food was below average. Maybe it’s the fusion thing. Too many food variety and asian mix. They cooked Chinese food better but not Thai. The Pad Thai noodles was hard. Papaya salad lacks flavor. Appetizers so so. The service was mediocre. We felt like we are burdening them with work. I don’t like it when they complain about serving. Our waitress said «that’s a lot of work» when we asked to place our left overs in boxes. They don’t seem to like working there. To be honest we just tossed the left overs the next day.

ok, let’s review the rules for finding good chinese food when your an out of towner.
1) if your non-​chinese coworker whom you’ve never even eaten chinese food with, tells you that they recommend a place… do the opposite, don’t go there
2) if you’re trying to find that hole-​in-​the wall place that reminds you of what your grand mother used to cook… a) DON’T expect to find it at a predominantly non-​chinese populated resort town
3) if you’re looking for $ 7-​$ 10 dishes overflowing with food like what your grand mother used to cook, (see #2a above)
4) if you enjoy spending $ 15 – 18 per dish and are on a hunger strike diet, then have i got a place for you.
I was so flabbergasted by the size of the dishes that I forgot to take pictures of the plates (i could have put the salt and pepper shakers next to them for reference)
my wife and inlaws were trying to hide the eye rolls and gaping mouthes from the server but i’m pretty sure the were outted.
we only go on vacation once a year, and that’s plenty of time for us to forget the above rules and we end up repeating the same mistake again and again.
they didn’t twist our arms, hold a gun to our heads, hold our feet to the fire or hold us captive…
2 yucky appetizers and 2 «entrees» later, $ 70 canadian poorer, and 10 pounds lighter!
fool me once, shame on you… fool me 10x’s, nobody to blame!
reeediculous

I have never given a negative review on Unilocal before, but we were just severely disappointed in the portions of the dishes. The ginger tofu and veggie wok stirfry plates were so small, they could have been considered appetizers. The korean beef dish was not much larger. We ordered 5 dishes for a family of five, and each was so small we were still hungry afterwards. It was a rather disappointing meal for $ 90.
Staff was friendly but you could tell they were understaffed in terms of waiters and chefs. Food took 35 min to arrive; we came in at 8 pm on a weekday.

We wanted to try some «non-​chain» restaurants in Banff and decided to come here after seeing such great reviews from fellow Unilocalers. I was apprehensive since we’re going for Thai food in a touristy location, but Unilocal helped put me at ease.
C’mon Unilocalers. .. you let me down! This restaurant is hard to find as it’s not located on the strip, but actually above the strip up some stairs. The place was ok in terms of decorations — nothing fancy at all and it seems like there were only 2 servers in the whole place which was fairly busy. As you can imagine, the service was incredibly slow.
We weren’t too hungry, so we got the Malaysian roti (we had amazing roti in Australia and were hoping for a repeat of the goodness) and got the classic pad see ew. The roti was definitely no where near as good as in Australia — there were 4 small balls of roti that were super greasy and obviously fried in butter (I don’t think butter is authentic Malaysian). .. the curry sauce to dip it was also fairly bland. The pad see ew had the flavors of traditional Thai, although more muted but cooked Italian style, as in al dente! The noodles they used weren’t the thick chewy rice noodles, but the thinner almost vermicelli-​like and hard! The veggies were also all underdone and contained the likes of asparagus?! I’ve never had asparagus in my pad see ew before!
It was definitely bordering on inedible. ..

Extremely cordial and friendly staff here at Bamboo Garden. As soon as we walked in (the elevator in the building takes you straight in to the restaurant), we were treated like old regulars. I was apprehensive at first, when I saw no one else eating in the restaurant, except for a couple out on their patio, but was easily mollified by all the delectable sounding things on their menu. We started with some Thai iced teas that were as refreshing as they were fragrant, and then ordered three appetizers and a main course to share. I really love that the menu is incredibly vegan/​vegetarian friendly, with markers to indicated which dishes are suitable, or which dishes they *can* make suitable. So much to choose from, it can be overwhelming at first, especially when you’re so used to only being able to eat 2 or 3 different things on a menu!
The Malaysian Roti with peanut sauce; so yummy, piquant and unlike any other peanut sauce I’ve ever had. I was sad when it was all gone. Then, they had these breaded Ube rolls which were equally delectable. The veggie spring rolls were so, so, but the Ube rolls. I’m salivating just reminiscing about them!
(I think they’re called something else on the menu, but to me, purple yam is Ube.)
The main course was Fried Tofu with stir-​fried veggies in a curry peanut sauce, served with a bowl of steamed coconut rice on the side. I don’t really eat white rice, but when I put a spoonful of that fluffy goodness in my mouth; it was all I could do to keep from throwing etiquette to the wind and burying my face in the bowl. I pushed it toward my companions with great regret. The tofu was fried to soft, crispy perfection and wasn’t greasy in the slightest. I was so cozy and full at the end of the meal; not at all sleepy from the heavy grease one normally expects from, say, Chinese food.
I’m not going to say it was the best Thai food I’ve ever had (though there were parts that were the best items I’d had that day!), since I’ve only visited once. All I can tell you, is that the first impression was extraordinary. I hope they succeed, and that more people come to see them when they visit Banff. They don’t have a website yet, but they do have a Facebook page: