Wednesday, February 16, 2011

BACCHUS ROTI SHOP: 1376 Queen Street West - (416) 532-8191

Outside Bacchus Roti
"Yeah.  I'm not going in there." my fiance Jessica said as we peered inside the window of a Parkdale restaurant that looked, well, less than reputable.  I think she may have been put off by the complete lack of patrons, the 5 year old boy sitting alone and staring at a TV, and the stacks of clear storage bins filled with clothing lining the walls next to the tables.

"Are you sure?" I said.

"Yeah, lets just go get some roti.  I'm starving."

I understood her completely.  The first casualty of hunger is adventure.  It's probably why hamburgers are so popular.  Alas dear readers, that intriguing (or shitty looking, depending on your point of view) restaurant will have to wait for another time.  Maybe I'll save it for a dinner with MT and ABM. 

So that's how we found ourselves at  little roti shop on Queen West called Bacchus Roti.  It was a darling little restaurant with over-sized lamps hanging above a single line of tables that led to the counter at the back.  It's the kind of restaurant where you order at the counter regardless of whether you're staying or going.  The menu was written out on the chalkboard to the left of the counter and you can peer into the kitchen and watch the cooks prepare the rotis if you're so inclined. 

The ordering counter
We were greeted by a lovely man who suggested a few dishes that the restaurant does best.  To start we ordered a plate of sweet potato fries because they were out of samosas.  For the mains I ordered the spinach, squash and channa (chickpea) roti and Jessica ordered the curried chicken roti with spinach, squash and potato.

Our entire order arrived super quick and looking fine.  The sweet potato fries were served with a honey mustard dip which was a bit of a revelation to us.  It pairs beautifully, far better than ketchup.  They were delicious with just the right amount of salt.  We gobbled them all up real quick.

Jessica's curried chicken roti
My spinach, squash and chickpea roti was ok at first but improved with each bite.  It didn't arrive as hot as I would have liked but aside from that it was pretty good.  Upon first and second bite I didn't strike me as anything special but I quickly realised that I was only getting the spinach and the chickpea.  On my third bite, when a big chunk of squash snuck in there, the flavours all came together reasonably well.  The roti wrap was ok but nothing special.  Definitely not as tasty as Mother India from a while back.  There was a distinct lack of crisp to this one.

Jessica's curried chicken roti was about the same.  Hers was pippin' hot, the chicken was nicely cooked, and the flavours blended well together.  It was actually a bit better than mine since the chicken cut that soggy and slightly fishy taste cooked spinach can often have if there's too much of it bunched together.  Jess really appreciated the fresh ingredients and it's speedy arrival to the table however she thought it was lacking a bit in the flavour department.  I completely agree!  But perhaps I've been unfairly biased towards Mother India's rotis since I enjoyed it so much...and those were just bursting with strong flavours!

Peanut Butter Star
For desert we ate a peanut butter star which is basically a peanut butter cookie with less sugar than usual and baked in a pastry.  It was fantastic!!!  Really dense and sweet and full of flavour.  Jess and I devoured it even though we weren't hungry at all at the end of the meal.  Also, I just wanted to say that I really appreciate inexpensive desert options!  To me, that's a huge plus.  Our peanut butter star cost two bucks!

So all in all a good meal.  I wouldn't say a great meal but a good one!  Mother India is still winning the Parkdale roti wars but there are still many competitors to come.

Rating: 3.5

Sunday, February 13, 2011

LEE'S THAI SPRING ROLL: 1512 Queen Street West - 416-532-2877

Outside Lee's Thai
Spring Roll restaurant

Remember the time when movie director Tim Burton used to be great?  For me, I mark Sleepy Hollow as the turning point.  Before that movie his career was on such an upward trajectory.  With amazing movies like Edward Scissorhands, Batman, Ed Wood, Beetlejuice, it seemed like the man could do no wrong.  I remember seeing Sleepy Hollow and, in addition to being amazingly bored throughout, thinking that he's starting to turn into a parody of himself.  His subsequent movies like Planet of the Apes, Corpse Bride, and Sweeny Todd seemed to prove me right (however, like most men I know, I have a weak spot for Big Fish...but its hardly a classic).  Then came along the movie that, if you asked me in 1998, I would have said he was born to make: Alice in Wonderland.  Based on Lewis Carroll's classic book for both children and adults, he's working with such amazingly rich and layered subject matter.  Its a sure fire deal.  So Jess and I got some Thai/Malaysian fusion takeout from Lee's Thai Spring Roll and sat down in front of the TV to watch what promised to be Tim Burton's Citizen Kane.

It wasn't.  It was awful.

Mango Chicken
And so was Lee's Thai Spring Roll.

Although Lee's Thai Spring Roll wasn't as horrible as Alice in Wonderland, but that's not saying much.

It pains me to write bad reviews.  I started this blog because I love my neighbourhood and eating at restaurants and I wanted to find those hidden gems that I might otherwise walk past.  Those alleyway restaurants that look like shit on the outside but serve food that tastes like heaven.  But I'm sorry Lee's Thai Spring Roll, we gave you TWO tries and both times you seriously disappointed. 

Tofu and Asparagus with
Mushroom Soya Sauce
Jess and I had eaten there a few months before I started this blog and we remembered the food as being, well, pretty crappy.  However we thought it might have just been comparatively crappy.  We often eat from The Friendly Thai on Roncesvalles and have our usual orders pretty well set there.  And for our first visit to Lee's Thai Spring Roll, we basically ordered the same thing we usually order at The Friendly Thai.  In comparison it failed in every way.  But really, that's not fair.  Restaurants should be judged on their stand alone merits, no?  Perhaps we were just demanding that over-sugared curried phad thai that The Friendly Thai does so well.  So for this visit, we ordered from the "Chef Recommends" portion of the menu and tried a few items we had never tried before.  I mean if the chef specifically recommends these dishes, they have to be the best dishes of the house, no?


The free Phad Thai
So we ordered the following: a Tom Yum Noodle Soup with seafood which is basically a soup with rice noodle, lemon grass, lime juice, and chili; Tofu and Asparagus with Mushroom Soya Sauce; the Mango Chicken dish which is lightly stir-fried chicken and shrimp with slices of fresh mangos and assorted vegetables.  We also ordered a couple of spring rolls and got a free Phad Thai as a reward for not eating at the restaurant and spending more than 35 bucks, I think.

Hmmm....writing a bad review is hard.  Its so much easier to discuss the qualities you like rather than the what you disliked.  I suppose I'll start off with the only dish that wasn't bad...the Tom Yum Noodle Soup.  It was a pretty nice soup, nothing great, but really packed with flavour.  Often soups with lemon grass can be overpowering but this one managed to walk that fine line between being full flavoured while not being overpowering.  The seafood in the soup was ok but nothing particularly spectacular.  Unfortunately the whole meal went downhill from there.

The decor.
The mango chicken dish was awful.  Sour and flavourless at the same time (yeah I didn't know that was possible either!!!).  The accompanying vegetables were way overcooked and the "fresh" mango was hardly fresh and cooked to shit as well!  The tofu and asparagus dish was almost passable but it lacked anything memorable.  There wasn't a hint of mushroom flavour anywhere to be found in the "mushroom soya sauce" (which makes it just soya sauce), the deep fried tofu looked old and tasted bland, and the asparagus was undercooked.  And the free phad thai?  The one Thai dish that is reeeeeeaaaaallllly difficult to screw up?  Well there's no other way of saying this so I'll just say it.  It tasted like baby vomit.  A horrible mix of peanut flavouring, Gerber baby food, and bile.  Honestly that's the best way I can describe it.  Really awful.

I'm sorry Lee's Thai Spring Roll.  Please don't hate me.  I'm sure you have a wonderful personality (and actually the decor in the restaurant was lovely). We might go see another Tim Burton movie, but we definitely won't be visiting you again.  I believe there are far better Thai food options in our neighbourhood.  And stay tuned for those!

Rating: 1.5

Sunday, February 6, 2011

CAFE POLONEZ: 195 Roncesvalles Avenue - (416)-532-8432

Jess and Craig outside the restaurant
I'm sitting in the departures terminal now trying my best not to vomit out of sheer panic and depression.  There's a huge snowstorm happening in Toronto and I have to get on a plane that will somehow navigate its way through it without crashing into the side of a mountain.  I'm on my way to visit my dad who recently bought a house in, and here's the depressing part, the worst state of the Unites States.......Florida.  Otherwise affectionately coined by Homer Simpson as "Americas Wang"

I knew this would happen which is why I visited two places last week so I might have something to do while I'm there.  I've never really cared much for the beach or even warm weather...and really there's nothing else that Naples, Florida offers.

So today, faithful readers, lets discuss Polish food.  What's the first thing that comes to mind when I say the phrase "Polish food"?  To me, its a scene in the sub-par movie Everything Is Illuminated based on the slightly above-par book of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer.  The main character Jonathan sits down in a Polish restaurant at a hotel and tries to explain to his interpreter, the interpreters father, and to the waitress that he is a vegetarian.  As you might imagine, it doesn't go as smoothly as you might think.  Here's the scene.

Jess eyeing Craig suspiciously while enjoying her rye bread.
With that in mind Jess and I visited Cafe Polonez on Roncesvalles and we brought along our good friend Craig Irving, possibly the least qualified individual to write restaurant reviews.  Craig is one of those characters who is amazingly picky about his food.  He's got weird hang-ups about certain things (like the sound of ketchup squirting from a bottle, mayonaise in general, really any type of sauce that can be made into a puddle).    However over the past few years he's made a strong effort to try as many new things as possible and his palate seems to be expanding slowly but surely.


Cheddar and potato perogies
When we first entered the place I was immediately struck by the decor.  It swept me back to my last trip to Poland in 2002.  The decor of Polish restaurants seem to find themselves in at the center of a triangularity between Medieval Times, the cafeteria at a retirement lodge, and a ski-chalet from  a medium-budget 80s porn film.  Very woody.  And more often than not in Canadian Polish restaurants, very fake woody.  Its awesome in every way!


Rye bread and butter
We are greeted by a lovely waitress and, as instructed, we sit anywhere we like.  Lucky for me I don't have to ask the waitress what the restaurant does best as the menu already has a marking next to the items that are known as customer favourites and house specialties.  We decide to start off by spliting a plate of cheddar and potato perogies served with sour cream.  I noticed that "pan fried" was an option for perogies but unfortunately I forget to mention it to our waitress and they arrive regular - along with an unpretentious plate of rye bread and butter.  They're both delicious, especially the perogies.  Like just really great perogies.  Indistinguishable from perogies from Poland...in fact, even a little better than I remembered. 

...
Ok fast forward a few days.  I thought I would be sufficiently bored in Florida that it would inspire me to write more blog posts.  It didn't happen.  Writing about Polish food in Florida is kinda like trying to write a sex column at your grandmothers funeral.  Your mood is so far away from your subject matter that you just can't even begin to form a coherent thought.  However I'm at the airport now on my way back to Toronto, and I'm feeling ok.

Cabbage Rolls
For my main I decide on a "customer favourite" cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and pork topped with tomato sauce.  It was good.  Not amazing, but good.  Usually cabbage rolls are stuffed pretty tight with whatever innards they choose that day but this one was fairly loose.  The flavours were fairly standard.  Nothing particularly complex here but you wouldn't really expect more from Polish food.  My side, which were the same sides my dinner-mates received, were kinda disappointing.  The carrots were waaaayyyy overcooked and not in that sweet awww-bubella kind of way that Eastern European cultures usually overcook their vegetables.  No the carrots were so overcooked that you could mash them into a puree without much effort.  Also on the plate was a beet salad and a cole slaw, both of which were pretty good.  The potatoes would have been entirely forgetful had it not included some fresh dill sprinkled on top of em.  For those of you who might not know, the smell of fresh dill inspires something fierce in us Jewish folk.  The smell alone could cause the most staunch atheist like me to stand on a table, peer down at a photo of my nephew, and start singing in the most Judaic and melancholic of melodies "Is this the little boy I carried....".  Unfortunately that feeling ended with the smell.  The potatoes themselves just kinda sucked.


Pork Loin in a horseradish
cream sauce
Craigs ordered a roast chicken meal with the same sides as me.  Sure it was moist, which is usually half the battle with chicken, and salty but didn't really ring anything memorable.  But Craig seemed to like it.  No complaints from him.  Jessica got the best meal of the bunch.  She had the roast pork loin in a horseradish cream sauce and fuck, it was great.  I'm all for subtlety, please, don't get me wrong.  But sometimes you really want to taste the horseradish!  And man, the horseradish in this dish just blasted through.  It was awesome.  The pork loin was reasonably well cooked.  But really the star for this dish was the horseradish cream sauce.  I could bathe in that stuff.  It was the star of the night.


Homemade apple cake
with ice cream

For desert we ordered a house specialty again which was a homemade apple cake with ice cream and it was lovely.  We all shared it and we all seemed to really like it.  I mean its hard to go wrong with cooked apples in cake form surrounded by ice cream but it this was the dish that really tasted like all eastern european food should taste like:  unpretentious whole-hearted love. Like a really big warm hug when you need it most.

On a whole, Cafe Polonez did seem to do its thing well.  Its very polish and seemed to hit many of the marks.  However it did lack something in the, and it pains me to write this, love department.  I don't mean for this to sound cheesy or pretentious but really, with this kind of food, there needs to be something inexplicable that really touches the heart and soul.  Flavours that can endure the centuries of conflict and flux that always seems to fall in Polands lap.  Flavours that keep you warm, even when its a cold dish.  Cafe Polonez hits the mark occasionally but really missed that mark where it really counted,  at least for me.  But maybe its different for others.

Rating:  3