The Burger Siren Song

I was going to get a low-fat meal of grilled chicken and vegetables.  I really, really was.

I pulled up to the place, got out and was going to go in and get that bland grilled chicken with a side of grilled vegetables (Mediterranean Style!), but then I smelled the burger place next door.

That smell!  It called to me!  It said "Snad...Snad...you want a burger!  It's tasty!  It's hot!  It comes with a side of fries!  It will taste so much better than grilled chicken and vegetables!  You know you want it!"

That siren song!  How could I resist!  I walked, trance-like, to the burger place.   It was run by three old guys.  I ordered a cheeseburger.  They had the toppings laid out, like the Harvey's of old.  It was glorious.

Beauty

I brought it to work, sat down in the lunch room, unwrapped it and watched all the men stare at it and salivate.  "Where did you get that burger?" they asked.  "Down the street," I said.  "Near the Healthy Choice place."

And I ate the whole burger.

It was glorious.

No one needed to get snooty. Snooty? Snotty! Snotty?

It was our wedding anniversary.  Spousal Unit decided that we needed to go somewhere "special" instead of the place we always go to, which has super long line-ups and doesn't take reservations because it is Trendy and so you should feel honoured that they make room for you.

Instead we went somewhere fancy.  It was a place downtown that boasts healthy, locally-sourced, blahblahblah, yaddayaddayadda food.  You know the type.

The thing about this place, though, was that we needed to dress up to go there.  Now you've never met us.   You don't even exist, so how could you have met us?  But if you did exist and if you had ever met us, you'd know that Spousal Unit and I don't really get gussied up.  We don't clean up well.

But we had to.  Because we had reservations and a sitter and whatnot.

So we put on our best outfits and showed up at the restaurant and felt like Ferris Bueller, Cameron and Sloan at Chez Quis. I kept calling Spousal Unit "Abe" and we made pancreas jokes. Of course, we didn't eat pancreas, but Spousal Unit did eat diseased duck liver (foie gras). I had the 5 course vegetarian tasting menu and Spousal Unit had the 5 course meatatarian tasting menu. This place was so good, it made tofu palatable.

It came out to a little over $200 with tax and tip, but we still were greeted with trash when we walked out.

Awwww....How nice!

Industrial Park Indian Buffet

My second visit to the Indian buffet in the industrial park south of the business park was with people who don't care if I start taking pictures of yucky plates. 

Dahl is awesome.

A friend of mine said that the place was still too new to have started sucking, so we figured we'd go there as often as possible til it started sucking.

The place is pretty damned good.  I mean, it's not the best Indian food ever, but it's pretty good for an industrial park buffet.  And it has bottomless baskets of naan!  Bottomless. Baskets. Of.  Naan.

Gulab jamun (jamon?), aka "warm sweet balls".

The naan was good.  The fish was weird.  The desserts were awesome.  And we all sat around enraptured with the Bollywood movie playing on the TVs in the restaurant.   

Latkes with a Heaping Side Order of Hipster

Stupid Whatever S phone!  I took pictures of this musical buffet brunch and then the stupid phone lost them.  Actually, it lost a whole bunch of photos.  I had no idea where they were, but I knew I hadn't deleted them.  I had to mount the stupid phone onto my machine to retrieve the damned pictures.  Stupid Whatever S phone!

All this to say that I didn't get around to writing about this brunch until now.

Back when The Spousal Unit and I were young and child-free, we used to go to this place for shows on a semi-regular basis.  It's in a "bohemian" (read: filthy and decrepit) neighbourhood that is quasi-famous in Canada thanks to a short-lived early-80s sitcom.  Of course in the 80s the neighbourhood was "ethnic" and there was an actual market.  Or so I'm told. 

Now the place is just filthy and full of hipsters who long for an "authentic" "ethnic" experience.  Of course, I never realized this until I went there for brunch recently.

The World's Tiniest Latkes shared the table with The World's Tiniest Slivers of Dessert

I was there to watch a friend's band play.  They're really good and they aren't hipster authentic by any stretch of the imagination.  They're actually old guys who've been playing together for ages and are probably the farthest things from hipsters you can get.  I have no problem with them or their music. Hence why they're my friends.

Anyways.

The brunch.  It's a "yiddish" brunch.  And a bunch of hipsters go there for an "authentic" "Jewish" "experience".  It's very ironic and meta.  Everyone's there in their fanciest shitty cloths, eating The World's Tiniest Latkes and The World's Tiniest Slices of Dessert, feeling all self-congratulatory about their choice of eating establishment because it shows that they're, you know, urbane and shit.

The food was OK, but I was woefully inappropriately dressed for brunch.

Want Wonton?

It was Friday. It was a nice day and neither I nor The Guy in the Cube Next to Me had brought lunch. He suggested we drive off to get some food. We were both getting over colds, so we decided to go grab soup. But what kind of soup? He suggested phô, but I never have good luck with phô. So then he suggested this wonton soup place where he knew the owners. Or at least he knew the original owners.

The original owners had a family spat and then one brother opened a place under the original name in another part of town, and the original place was taken over by the other brother and its name changed to something else entirely. But apparently both places were exactly the same, with the same menu and everything.

The Guy in The Next Cube said that everything at this place, from the soup to the noodles to the wonton was made from scratch, but that the place itself was totally ghetto and had almost no parking.

The guy was right about the parking situation: the lot was cramped and there appeared to be way too few spots for the number of restaurants in the plaza.

Chopsticks, spoon and mystery noodle.

I let my coworker order for me because the menu wasn't really in English and my coworker speaks Cantonese. I think the broth was a fish broth. The wontons were these baseball-sized balls of shrimp (you can only get shrimp, not that the English menu mentions this) wrapped in thin wonton dough. The noodles were..something? No one could tell me what was in the noodles. They were "wonton noodles". I sometimes wish that I could get better info whenever I went to an "authentic" Asian place. I mean, seriously, why is it that I can't get a straight answer at these places? Am I just supposed to assume that the lack of straight answers and accurate English menu speaks to the authenticity?

*sigh*

Whetevs. It was tasty. And my coworker was impressed with my chopstick skills.

That's a Very Loose Interpretation of Pork Dumplings

I hate it sometimes when I forget my lunch at home.

On days when I've gotten a really shitty parking spot and figure that if I leave and come back I'll get a better spot, I don't mind getting in my car and driving to get something reasonable to eat. 

On other days, I get a really, really good parking spot and I'd rather not lose it just to go grab lunch.  On those days I'm at the whim of the two lunch counters that cater to my business park.

As you know (if you exist and if you've read anything beside this post on this blog) I have given up on the revoltingly greasy diner preferred by my coworkers and have instead started to frequent the "sandwich" place that boasts bulgogi and bim bim bap on their menu.  The other day I went to that place on Dumpling Tuesday.  I'd never had dumplings from them before and figured it couldn't be that bad.  I mean, their Business Park Bulgogi was pretty decent, and plus they have Sriracha to make their food palatable.

Why bother with the pork in pork dumplings?

Oh geez, how wrong I was!  The "pork" "dumplings" were these deep-fried things filled with what appeared to be pulverized cabbage.  They tasted of fried and that was about it.  They were served with rice and some random sauce.    Thank the Universe for Sriracha or else I don't think I would have eaten that day.

It was so bad that for the first time I regretted not going to the greasy diner; they had pierogies that day.

The Smells of Eastern Europe

That's maple syrup, from happier brunches.

I made latkes for brunch over the weekend.

They were potato and sweet potato baked latkes -- or at least they were supposed to be baked. 

Spousal unit decided that the latkes "weren't turning out right" baked and fried a few.  The problem with that is that you can't fry latke batter made for baking; it absorbs way too much oil.

The long and the short of it was that the latkes ended up being revolting oily masses and the whole apartment stunk of fried food.  Spousal Unit (who is kinda Polishy/Russianesque) joked that the place smelled like Eastern Europe. 

At least the coffee was good.