Local Flavour, Lasting Impact | What Our Food Scene Builds for Kamloops
BC Ale Trail
Kamloops’ growing food and beverage scene is about more than great places to eat. Local restaurants, breweries and producers help create a vibrant community, while visitor spending supports local businesses, jobs and a thriving culinary culture year-round.
By Maeghan Summers, Owner of The Noble Pig Brewhouse
Part 5 of 8 in the “What Tourism Builds for Us” series
When I think about what makes a community vibrant, I think about the places where people come together. For me, that has always been around a table. Food has an incredible ability to connect us, and so many of the moments we remember most happen over a meal: first dates, birthdays, celebrations, catching up with an old friend or welcoming someone home. After more than three decades in hospitality, I’ve had the privilege of watching thousands of those moments unfold, and it has convinced me that restaurants are about so much more than what we put on the plate.
My own introduction to hospitality came early. I was nine years old, wanted a dirt bike, and my dad told me to get a job. Somehow that resulted in me serving at a Kamloops Blazers banquet. I got the dirt bike, but I also found an industry that would become a huge part of my life. Today, I’m part of the team at The Noble Pig Brewhouse, where I’ve spent the past 15 years, and I also work with hospitality students at Thompson Rivers University. Through all of that, I’ve had a front-row seat to the evolution of Kamloops’ food and beverage scene.
My dad worked in restaurants here too, and we recently talked about how dining in Kamloops has changed between his generation and mine. He remembers the rise of chain restaurants and the role they played in getting people comfortable with dining out regularly. In many ways, that created the foundation for what came next: independent restaurants, breweries, bakeries and other businesses offering something more local and connected to place. Diners have evolved too. People still want great food, but increasingly they care about the atmosphere, the service, where ingredients come from and what their decision to support a business contributes to.
We saw that shift firsthand at The Noble Pig. When we opened 15 years ago, we wanted to change our menu four times a year so we could use seasonal ingredients and work more closely with local farmers and suppliers. That took some explaining. Supporting local food production means adapting to what is actually available and finding creative ways to use what our farmers and producers grow and raise. Today, that philosophy is much more familiar, and Kamloops diners have embraced it.
That evolution has helped create an increasingly interesting food culture across the city. We have farmers, ranchers, butchers, bakers and producers doing incredible work alongside breweries, wineries, restaurants and chefs. Kamloops may not always be the first place people think of as a culinary destination, but our food scene reflects so much of who we are as a community: hardworking and unpretentious, but also creative, adventurous and increasingly interested in what is being made in our own backyard.
What I love most about this industry, though, is still the people. At The Noble Pig, I’ve watched couples come in for their first date and return years later to celebrate engagements, marriages and growing families. We become a small part of the milestones of people's lives. They may not always remember exactly what they ordered, but they remember who they were with and how that moment felt. Food is the conduit that brings people together, and restaurants, cafés, pubs and breweries provide the places where those connections happen.
Of course, those gathering places also have to work as businesses, and that is where the visitor economy becomes an important part of the story. Summer in Kamloops is a perfect example. When the weather gets warm, many locals head to the lake, go camping or otherwise enjoy the incredible backyard around us. At exactly the same time, visitors are arriving in Kamloops, and that shift in spending is incredibly important for hospitality businesses.
At The Noble Pig, we might serve around 200 guests on a typical evening, while during some of our busiest tourism periods we can expand our operation and serve upwards of 1,000 to 1,200 people. Those guests include leisure travellers, tour groups, railway passengers and families visiting Kamloops. Visitors don't replace our local customers. Our community is the foundation of everything we do. But they add another layer of demand that helps us employ people, purchase products and continue investing in our business.
The relationship works both ways. Residents are often our greatest tourism ambassadors. When a visitor checks into a hotel, stops at a gas station or strikes up a conversation and asks where they should eat, it is usually a local person who makes the recommendation. If our community loves and supports its restaurants, breweries and local experiences, visitors discover them too. They spend money in those businesses and, hopefully, leave Kamloops telling someone else about the great place they found here.
That spending also travels much further through the community than most people probably realize. Over the past decade, The Noble Pig alone has purchased more than $10 million in food from within the Kamloops community. Those purchases support farmers, butchers, bakeries, markets and suppliers, helping sustain other businesses and families throughout our region. And that is the impact of just one restaurant.
Tourism and events also introduce people to parts of our community they may not otherwise experience. I think about weekends like Ribfest and Hot Nite in the City. Thousands of people are walking downtown, noticing a restaurant they haven't tried, a new shop or a patio that wasn't there the last time they visited. They might not walk through that restaurant door today, but they may come back next Friday. That residual impact matters. Events and great public spaces give people a reason to move through our city, discover businesses and build a different relationship with a place.
For me, another important part of this story is the opportunity hospitality creates for people. Over the past 15 years, approximately 600 people have worked at The Noble Pig. Every member of our current front-of-house leadership team started as a junior server, and the newest member of our leadership team has been with us for six years. Some of our chefs have been with us for close to a decade, while former employees have gone on to build careers in other businesses across the community. Hospitality can be someone's first job, but it can also be the beginning of a profession, a business or an entire career.
I see that possibility when I work with hospitality students at TRU. They bring incredible energy and ideas into our industry, and I think our responsibility as established leaders is to help them see that they can build those ideas here. I left Kamloops myself and had incredible experiences living elsewhere, but leaving also gave me a much greater appreciation for what we have. Here, I could build a career in hospitality while still enjoying the life I wanted outside of work. I could golf, ski, paddleboard, head to the lake and be part of a community where people and businesses genuinely support one another. That quality of life matters when we're asking talented young people to consider putting down roots.
When we talk about the visitor economy, it can be easy to focus on how many people came, where they stayed and how much they spent. But I think there is another question worth asking: what does that activity help make possible for the people who live here? In food and beverage, it helps sustain the restaurant where you'll celebrate an anniversary, the bakery you visit on Saturday morning and the brewery where you meet a friend after work. It supports the farmer growing food just outside the city, the student discovering a career and the entrepreneur deciding whether Kamloops is the place to take a chance on a new idea.
A great food scene makes Kamloops a more interesting place to visit, but first and foremost, it makes Kamloops a better place to live. Residents create the foundation, visitors add important demand, and together they help support the businesses and people that give our community its flavour. A vibrant food culture isn't simply about eating well. It's about creating gathering places, supporting local businesses, building careers and giving people more reasons to love where they live.
It’s about living well.
Maeghan Summers is a longtime Kamloops hospitality professional, Operations Manager at The Noble Pig Brewhouse and an instructor at Thompson Rivers University.
