Bear's Paw Bakery — Restaurant in Municipality of Jasper

This review is based on a single visit.

This is apparently a very popular bakery in Jasper. While we were there, we learned that this bakery has loyal local customers, visitors returning for more treats, and first timers (like us) who had heard of the deliciousness created here.

At noon on a summer Sunday, the bakery was full of customers. All the tables and counter space were occupied with visitors, sipping their drinks and having pastries. The line was almost out the door. We don't know if this is normal, but for us this is how it was.

There were plenty of young and friendly staff to handle the workload. Everyone was hustling about, filling orders and making sure that the customers were taken care of well. We did not wait in line long before we placed our orders.

We got a couple of pastries and regular drip coffees. The pastries were OK. We suspected the pastries would have been better right out of the oven, but that's more of a timing thing than a quality thing.

The medium and dark coffees we had were excellent. Excellent. We neglected to take note of the name of the coffee we had. However, we believe they were local to the area.

The seating area inside the bakery was full. There were small tables and counter space for customers. There's also some seating outside, but not very much. For the bakery, that's a great problem to have, a bakery full of customers. For customers, however, it could be a problem if you wanted to have a place to sit and enjoy the pastries. We took ours out to the parking lot across the street and eight off the bed of our truck. We're used to it, and to be honest, we preferred it.

The parking lot across the street from the bakery is more than enough to handle the customers that visit. If not, there's street parking available. However, everything is "paid parking" so keep...

Tldr: an amzing bakery to get breakfast/ pastries. Their breads and coffee were meh.

Over 10 days ive had the opportunity to try a number of their items. Here are the deets: rasberry white chocolate scone: 10/10 - best scone ive ever had hands down, perfect mix of tatrt and sweet; pumpkin pie scone: 7/10 - cant really taste pumpkin; almond croissant: 5/10 - filling doesnt go to the edges, overwhelming almond essence flavor, and pastry was staleish both times i had, which is odd given that they are baked fresh; chocolate croissant: 7/10 solid effort - pretty generic; pumpkin pie tart - 10/10: its like youre eating a mini pumpkin pie with finally the right amount of pastry to pie filling; butter pecan tart: 7/10 - again solid effort but pretty generic. Rhubarb crumble square : 8/10 - tasty and big enough for two servings, it is a bit overly sweet though that might be to balance the tartness of the rhubarb i suppose. Morning glory muffin: 10/10 - near perfect blend of nuts seeds and dried fruit, quite filling. French baguette: 6/10 - your typical baguette though a bit pale (not the typical golden brown) and the 5-10cm ends on both sides were already super hard when i got it. Olive bread: 8/10 - good flavour, esp for cheese sandwiches. Italian herbs bread:3/10 - their most dissapointing product, because it is somewhat braided their are alot of hard edges within the bread, over all it was rubbery - a super weird texture that ive never quite had before in bread and did not enjoy. Coffee: 5/10 - nothing amazing, pretty meh to be honest. Americano: 7/10 much better than their cofee but again nothing to...

The extra star is because the staff were pleasant and one offered a refund when I told them the food was stale. I'm sad to write this but honestly the pastries and the coffee were dire. I asked if they were freshly baked because they tasted at least three days old. A raspberry white chocolate scone that was so dry and floury with no flavour, definitely stale, an almond croissant that was rock hard and tasted a bit of mould which I had to throw away, and I haven't actually eaten the little gorgeous looking pecan tart because I'm afraid I'll break a tooth after looking at the pastry properly. The latte was burned and bitter and the milk was overheated to the point it's taken over twenty minutes to be able to take a sip. It's such a shame because in a tiny town like this I'd love to be able to support them and I'm hoping maybe this was just a bad day but I can't believe that these were baked fresh within 24hours. After seeing the photos on the website I expected a decent coffee but unfortunately it wasn't even close to the marketing photos. The person behind me in the queue had the same experience with their food and drink. This is obviously a very popular spot with tourists but coming from Canmore it's hard to stomach a $20 bill for food and drink that I couldn't enjoy. I declined the refund as I don't think it's fair on the business as they still had to pay for the ingredients and staff time. If anyone reads this, please cover your pastries and use a thermometer for your...