Maybe a restart?

 It's been ten years since I toured the Plaza, so many spots have turned over once, twice, or more in that time.  

Unfortunately, the biggest change in all that time?  Prices going up, except for the places that just give you food for ten meals but no knives.

 Today's lunch, from Sowon, is a veggie bibimbap.  That is, it's some shredded lettuce, a bit of cucumber, some shredded cukes, a bit of sesame spinach, a lackluster fried egg, and some sesame potatoes as a side.  

 This, served with rice, is not $19.20 worth of food.  (Honestly, if the food costs are more than $3, I'd be surprised.)  They advertise Korean-style fried chicken, but I don't want a whole pile of wings with no sides (and if I did, I could get it from Molly's, for less). 

 I need to start bringing my own lunch, but I'll try to also start updating this tour.  I hope you are eating well, and keeping safe.

Yoodlism

Hi!  We've not had posts here in over 4 years, but how about one about a brand-new place, so new that it's not even yet got a place-where-you-can-be-tagged in Facebook?

Yoodlism has gone into the spot where Grab-A-Greek previously was, in the near Plaza.  I went there today, because I didn't feel like sushi (another great recent addition: Sushi Ken, in the building bizarrely named Blair House, which is not at all the real Blair House), and Sweet Dreams had a huge line.

I was the only white person in the restaurant the whole time I was there.  The menu is short, a handful of versions of "noodles in broth with stuff", and a moderate number of choices for add-ons.  The menu includes several Chinese menu typos (most notably using "pig" where "pork" would raise fewer eyebrows).  I think there's only one vegetarian version of the noodles, a spicy dish with preserved vegetables.  So I ordered that, and the server specifically said, "the vegetarian one?"  "Yes."  They also don't have visible drinks other than a fridge with cans of soda and my server didn't understand when I asked if they only had soda

The bowl of noodles came a few minutes later.  Basically, a bowl of broth with lots of noodles and bok choi, and some cilantro on top.  The noodles are very tasty, and the broth is lip-tinglingly filled with Sichuan pepper flavour.  There's also some good sesame oil floating on top, and a good hit of chili and maybe star anise.  You don't seem to drink the broth, but it's just a lot of flavour for the noodles.  (There were no spoons, and I didn't see anyone drink it; it's served in wide ramen-type bowls.)

This is the most flavourful meal I've had in the plaza in quite a while, honestly.  (This is counting Sushi Ken as not-in-the-plaza; I'd say it was better.)  I hadn't realized that what I was missing in my life was noodles with Sichuan pepper, but in practice, maybe I was.  I really like the idea of eating a bowl of their noodles while drinking at Kick Off, which is next door.  I don't know how they do take-out...

I had:
The vegetarian special noodles (they were described with more words, but I don't remember them), and a can of ginger ale.
I paid: $12.95 including tax.  I can't remember if I tipped (looks in pocket; oh, hm, I guess not).
Verdict:
Speed: pretty good.  I'd had a pretty intense morning, so I didn't mind taking a few minutes to wait for my noodles.  I don't know if they make the noodles there. but they had a big tray of uncooked noodles, and I'm pretty sure they added them to a big pot of boiling water when I ordered.
Quality: very good!  Noodles tasty, broth really flavourful, decent amount of bok choi.
Would go back: Yes, definitely.  They had very little business when I was there.  I hope that changes.

Curry in a Hurry

I haven't been here in ages; if I want Indian food, I go to Kismet (though, after my visit there, I might instead go to Aunty's Cafe). (Yes, I do realize that Kismet is Bengali food, and of course, it's really UK-ish Indian food. Meh.)

In retrospect, I may have been too quick to write off Curry in a Hurry. It got bad, um, 8 or 10 years ago? But today's lunch, with D., was tasty.

Their menu allows the addition of flavourful items to your curry (it kind of feels a little too much like pizza toppings: spinach, onions, tomatoes, potatoes, etc.), which I think helps a lot, and specifically avoids the thing that I most dislike about Kismet: that my curry is a few hunks of meat in a sea of sauce. Instead, I got butter chicken with spinach and onion in it, and it turned out to be a good mix. They will spice to your preference, though this largely seems to consist of throwing hot sauce at the finished dish. (I don't think it's rooster sauce.) That seemed to be the primary difference between my dish and D.'s.

Today it was very windy outside, so we both wanted to warm up, so I had chai and D. had tea, as part of the lunch special. Two cups of tea later, and a nice spicy meal in my belly, I was much more comfortable facing the wind. Then the weather worsened, but this is conveniently not a weather blog.

I had: The lunch special: butter chicken with tomatoes and spinach, rice, a samosa, and a cup of chai
I paid: $11.50 + tax + tip, or around $14.50.
Verdict:
Speed: It was genuinely hurried. We got our drink order out before we'd gotten our coats off (I guess we looked cold!), and our food arrived soon thereafter.
Quality: I enjoyed it. The rice, in particular, I liked, but the overall dish was good. The spinach helped a lot. The samosa was more meh: in particular, I didn't like how grey the potato filling was!
Value: It seems a bit pricey, honestly. D. took home leftovers; I didn't. I thought the calzone last week was better value.
Would go back: Yeah, probably. I think Kismet is likely my least favourite of the three Indian options in the plaza, now.

McGinnis Front Row

This is basically a sports bar, but it's migrated over time to being more of a general-purpose restaurant, too. I've never been a fan, and a year ago, we had a co-op going away lunch there, where I had bad food and our receptionist, whose family owns the best fishmonger in town, had terrible fish.

This time, I went with three staff members, largely to acknowledge all of the great work they've done this year. I probably should've paid more attention to the food than I did, maybe eating off their plates (er, maybe not; that'd be rude!), but I will say that it was a better meal than the last time I'd been there.

Service seemed super-slow: why does it take 15 minutes between sitting us down and getting our orders? By that point, the TV at our table (yay sports bar!) was covered up with my menu to remove distractions. And I wish that there were, um, something appealing on their beer list. But once they'd gotten their groove going, they were actually pretty fast, replacing empty drinks quickly, for example.

In the end, I had chicken fingers with seafood chowder. I appreciated that there was the possibility of having something other than french fries with the chicken fingers, and the soup was pretty good. The chicken fingers themselves were tasty, but the breading was kind of boring: I'm used to it being spiced up (and salty), and instead it was more meh.

But overall, this wasn't a bad meal, and the company was great.

I had: chicken fingers with a side of seafood chowder, with iced tea to drink
I paid: lunch for the 4 of us was around $80; the other three people had sandwiches or salads
Verdict:
Speed: Pretty slow, particularly to take our orders
Quality: Fine? It looked like the chips and "avocado salsa" (you used to call it guacamole?) that D. had was good. H. got a burger that came with both onion rings and fries; the onion rings were pretty squishy with grease. She didn't eat them.
Value: This didn't feel appropriately priced. I kind of wish we'd been able to go to the (substantially more expensive) Xmas buffet at the University Club, though; really, the goal was to share some holiday fun with some hard-working colleagues. So that's okay.
Would go back: I can't see why. I'll probably go there because I have to, not because I want to.

Campus Pizza

I believe there are only two pizza places in the plaza: this one, and Pizza Nova. (Though what I got at Meet Point was kind of pizza-like as well. And you can get pizza at East Side Mario's.) In some ways, that surprises me: we have a huge number of Chinese places, for example.

But I can't help but blame the Canadian Dairy Board. (Gentle Reader, you knew it was eventually going to be a rant about the Dairy Board, didn't you?)

(Actually, you probably didn't.)

The Canadian Dairy Board is part of the amazingly complicated and byzantine system by which the supply and cost of dairy products are set here in Canada. Basically, it's extremely difficult to sell imported dairy products here (tarriffs, quotas, etc.), and dairy prices inside the country are kept high by forbidding people to sell dairy products unless they have the "right" to sell it, and that right is itself a commodity that can be bought and sold.

The effect of this is that cheese here is incredibly expensive.

The real reason this most galls me is that the US (which is my native land) also offers high subsidies to dairy farmers, but in the form of payments to farmers, not high prices on dairy. So in the US, cheese is half as expensive.

(So is cream, but that's a rant for another day; I vaguely started that rant when I visited Marble Slab Creamery a couple months ago.)

One consequence of this, I think, is that we eat less pizza in Canada than we otherwise might. The pizza recipe that I make includes 140 grams of cheese (er, 5 ounces) for a pie that serves 2-3 people. That much cheap, boring, bulk mozzarella would cost roughly $2-$3: it's by far the most expensive ingredient in the pizza unless I top it with duck confit. (I, um, don't.)

Restaurants typically have 20%-25% food costs: that is, what you pay is roughly 4-5 times what the cost of the food was. You can't do that affordably when pizza cheese costs that much!

So pizza in Canada has the property of being either cheap and truly lousy, or expensive, and still not necessarily very good. (Ice cream, same story. Don't get me started on "double-churned" ice cream; I didn't realize I needed twice as much air whipped into my dessert!)


This panzerotti was surprisingly good, but also expensive. Though, truly, that's because of the toppings: I had them put onions, anchovies and broccoli in it. I still don't see how that turned into 5 toppings (the broccoli ostensibly was supposed to count for two), but I paid the price of a panzerotti with five toppings. Still, I did enjoy the pie. It was huge: D. had the leftovers for dinner tonight. It came along with a tomato dipping sauce that was "zesty", but also too sweet and blah. But the pie itself was tasty, surprisingly cheesy (given the rant I just gave), and had a generous amount of broccoli. The one meh-ness was that it had a lot of crust, which ultimately tasted like generic toasted white bread. But still, it was good.

I eat their pizza pretty often, as it's one of our common sources for pizza to have when we mark exams, say. This was fresher, and tastier.

I had: A panzerotti with broccoli, anchovies and onions.
I paid: $11.23. I think I was supposed to pay something more like $10, as the plain pie was $5, and each topping another $1 (broccoli counting twice), so this should've been more like $9 + tax = around $10, not $10 + tax = around $11. Ah, well.
Verdict:
Speed: OK, but not great. Still, if I'd been in a hurry, I wouldn't have ordered something that needed to be custom made. I think I waited 10-15 minutes.
Quality: As I said, it had surprising numbers of good things about it. I've never gone to Campus Pizza for lunch directly (just gotten it at university events), and it really was better fresh. I didn't like the tomato sauce, and yet still kept dipping my food in it. This is mildly embarrassing to admit.
Value: I paid too much, but even still, it was a ton of panzerotti, and turned into a lunch for me and a dinner for D. This was certainly fine. Toppings do seem strikingly expensive in general.
Would go back: You know, I rarely feel like pizza for lunch. But I may toss this into the rotation.

Pita Factory

This is yet another in the enormous list of pita places in the plaza. I believe the total is 5, and Pita Factory, like Pita Pit (which I haven't yet reached on this tour), is a franchise.

Today's chicken souvlaki was more expensive than at other places in the plaza. But I guess I'd admit that parts of it were better: it's December, and yet the tomatoes in my sandwich were pretty good. I fear for my breath, as the onions were fierce. And the pita didn't fall apart.

Workflow was not bad; I did notice that all of the people behind the counter were hunched over their table, and it isn't as fast as Grab-A-Greek, which has a smaller menu. But this was nothing like Just-N-Pita, which makes me nervous every time I go.

I had: a chicken souvlaki pita
I paid: $8.30 or so. (I can't remember, and I then got a coffee, so I can't tell from just counting my change.
Verdict:
Speed: okay. I kind of felt like I waited a couple minutes more than I'd have liked
Quality: better than I expected. The chicken tasted of chicken, and there were tomatoes and onions with the right flavours.
Value: I'm unconvinced that it's a $8+ sandwich. The ones at Just-N-Pita have more toppings, while at Grab-A-Greek they're cheaper. They're much cheaper at Phat Hat (name recently changed), but not tasty there.
Would go back: rarely. The physical experience is much more "deliberately uncomfortable" than at most of the other plaza restaurants: the chairs are hard, there are too many of them, etc. There are better choices.

Kick Off

This is really a bar, not a restaurant; M., with whom we went, is a regular and claimed that the owners hate it when people order food, and that they only have food because they legally must.

But it's still a restaurant, so D. and I went with M. after work yesterday.

And the beer was excellent, and the conversation very good (I really don't know why we don't spend more time with M.; possibly the right answer is to go there for beerz more often). And I was amused that, instead of being grumpy about feeding us, the owner we were talking with was happy to serve me pierogies, and to serve D. fries, and agreed with me that they were tasty.

Which they were, if fried-from-frozen.

I had: two half-litre pints of a Weißbier, and an order of pierogies
I paid: $52, but that was for a five pints, plus the pierogies and fries. I think it was $6.95 a pint?
Verdict:
Speed: The beer was fast; the food wasn't, but we'd been there over an hour when we ordered it, and by that point I really didn't care, as I was enjoying myself.
Quality: Beer was great, pierogies were fine.
Value: I think $6.95 a pint is a little high? But I guess it's fine. I don't drink in bars all that often.
Would go back: Yeah. There was video on the screen of a soccer game with massive amounts of snow, which was even fun in a Schadenfreude-kind of way. I'd go back.