Good for What Ails Some

It’s the kind of place people blow into to cure what ails them. Where meatheads regale the girls they take out for breakfast with stories about the worst hangovers of their lives. It’s the kind of place a young family comes to solidify some notion of kinship, community, safety, never expecting to hear someone swear like a sailor in the breakfast crowd. There are others: friends, the young, the old, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat. They all have their own reasons for coming. And of course, they all have a common reason for coming too, that being the food.

After regaling the locals with my own interest in the place, I was told it wasn’t as good as it used to be. That supple yearning for a sentimental past, it follows us everywhere, whether in fashion or food, whether on the barn exterior or log cabin interior of the place. Whether using carriage wheels for chandeliers or pitchforks for coat hangers (kind of clever, I know). So it goes. It’s what places do. Where would the business of food be if nothing mythologized the restaurant? Nothing would give me more joy than knowing that out there there are places that value the food alone. But alas, dear eaters, all of our outings to food locations must be imbued with culinary identity, the business must be appeased that way or cease to exist at all.

The Cedar Barn plays the part well. Known for its breakfast, known even more for its country bumpkin dining pretense, it’s a place where you can come and have a love affair with breakfast that you may or may not regret, depending on your standards.

The menu certainly made mince meat of any mirage the space may have created. It was a food slum. It had everything, a Smörgåsbord board of breakfast, lunch, and dinner- of pizza themed stuffs, chicken fingers, steaks, perch battered, of all seemingly urbane and out place things, in panko breadcrumbs. These were only a few of the things that made me raise an eyebrow at the good sized menu. I was less judgmental when it came to considering what was offered for breakfast. All a comfortable choice of options for a suspicious fee that had me ordering two separate plates: two pancakes for an easy 4 dollars and 15 cents, and a breakfast plate of eggs, toast, hash browns and sausage for a price so low my otherwise miserly mind, maybe for the first time in a long time, forgot about it.

Now, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that in every hashhouse, breakfast is a thought provoking paradigmatic process. We order a choice on the menu and the wait staff, provided it has the finesse, guides us through the syntagm that is our order. We order eggs, they ask: how cooked? We order toast, they say: how burnt? What kind of bread? The Cedar Barn is no exception. Now, the only struggle that comes from ordering might be in the volume one’s forced to speak at because The Barn is a loud place, especially on a late Sunday morning. So, if you don’t speak with a little fervency, there’s a chance you ask for onions on your hash browns and instead get green peppers. So again, a heads up. Speak up, or wait a long while before you replace any creamers, coffee, or even cutlery.

My pancakes taught me a valuable lesson too. Don’t be so quick to judge. The enormous portion made me question where I had eaten in the past and made me conclude that such a cheap price was made for a small quantity. Quality is another story. The pancakes had everything I could have reasonably expected. Dense in volume, but fluffy in appearance. Sweetly flavoured and cooked through. I tolerated the dry caliber of the things because I knew the point was to absorb every ounce of syrup I poured over them. Still, I would have preferred fluffy and dry, because when it comes to making something that’s dense also moist, it takes a steady mind to eat. Food goes down thick and gluey. Either way, went down it did.

The customary nature of my second dish made it hard to get excited. I did my best to exalt it to some position of good eating, like asking for dark rye bread instead of white, demanding the fabled farmer’s sausage (a specialty of the house, I was told), but eggs and bacon and the like are never a surprising device of gastronomica- not for breakfast. It’s comfort food, tried, tested, and true. If a place can’t cook eggs, even the humblest eaters deny the cook the slightest of nods. It’s a harsh thing to say my food could have used some salt, because the Barn does this with, I assume, good reason, and that is to appease all taste buds. On the other hand, it is easy to take such an act as a lack of confidence in a place’s own food, but I’ll leave it at that. My hash browns had enough bite, but weren’t nearly as well done as I would have liked them to be. If I learned anything from The Cedar Barn however, it was that the cooks in the kitchen, at least at breakfast, were only extensions of every customer’s hands, because it is up to us to tell them exactly how we like it. That may be the place’s one redeeming quality. It certainly wasn’t the sausage, a saltless banger boiled first and then grilled second to save time and pull the culinary wool over diners’ eyes. Does it work? Not in the slightest. The meat, a dull grey, was drained of all savoury flavour and tasted unbearably off.

I could have easily filled my stomach, especially with the inexpensive portions, only the food couldn’t keep me interested long enough. Then again, it was only breakfast.

The Cedar Barn

(519) 664-2569

1217 Lobsinger Rd
Waterloo, ON N2J 4G8

Open early, e’ry day.

Any payment

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