Poo Pooing on Smoke's Poutinerie

You’d be hard pressed not to find poutine anywhere in this city. You would be hard pressed to find good poutine, though. So when I saw Smoke’s Poutinerie occupy the spot of a restaurant that failed, I wondered if it would be the prodigal poutine son of this city. 

Since its inception five years ago, the franchise has garnered a shocking amount of success all over Canada. I couldn’t even sit in the small fast food joint without being pestered by the many mounted reviews by other writers placard in the place. But, as usual, I was skeptical.

If I cared enough, I would have remembered Smoke’s creator’s name. If there was anything worth remembering it was that the creator was from Ontario and a graduate of business from Wilfrid Laurier University. The creator himself worked in brands after graduation, from beer companies to shoes, managing and making things better, but tired, as I read from one review while waiting for my order, of the brand industry “as a whole [being] too self-consciously hip and trend obsessed.”

Apparently, he wasn’t aware of the kid behind the counter shelling out his product, the pinnacle of the definitive hip cook today, wearing a fedora, covered in tattoos, maintaining whatever edgy masculinity he could, all the while fighting against the feminine underpinnings of living working life in a conventionally feminine space. Sorry, dude.

The Poutinerie is nothing more than dubious. I wonder if people are really so foolish to disavow the space in lieu of what its creator said, ignoring the classic rock blaring over the speakers, the potatoes kept out in the dining area in bags decorated in the place’s brand with some scrub wearing coke bottle glasses and hockey hair manifesting the qualities of trendiness and ironic hipster cache that its creator said he hated. There were t-shirts for sale with this man, nostalgic middle America diner shoutings like ‘order up’ said by kids wearing pork pie hats. Are we kidding ourselves? The yuppies coming in to buy one and a half cups of soggy fries slathered in gravy for 8 dollars must have been. 

I won’t deny the success of a clever marketing strategy, but I will be outraged at such words assuming I’m so stupid. Is the Poutinerie’s popularity a result of local patriotism? An Ontario native, a Laurier grad? Or is it the hope for a good poutine? The rude, obnoxious bumpings of patrons with not so much of an excuse me spoke of the place’s reputation preceding it. I felt like people ate here not because they knew good food, but because all the cool kids in the big city it started in were eating there first, and consuming brands is way more important. Why people still pay such ostentatious prices for this kind of elevated crap still baffles me. Kudos to Poutinerie for having the gull to put different ingredients on food and maybe exploiting the bad palettes of the nation, but there is nothing at all special about this food. I bought the traditional ‘signature’ gravy with Quebec cheese curds, and even after 13 minutes of keeping a box closed they still didn’t melt. They were dull, dense, sour, and squeaked between my teeth. The gravy was watery, pooled in the bottom of the package as salty gelatinous puddles, and the fries were soggy, soaked, and under fried.

I didn’t stop there. I gave it a second chance before I ran out of money. I tried the nacho grande. A poutine with homemade chili (whatever that meant), a smattering of tomato salsa, some sour cream, a squirt of guacamole in a corner of the box, topped with confusingly crunchy jalapenos. The meat was rubbery, rehydrated and flavourless; the beans sucked whatever moisture out of my mouth, and those damned cheese curds were thrown in to maintain that poutine persona that just doesn’t work.

I’d usually say high calorie food like this is the kind of stuff you cry your sorrows into, and it can be a comforting thing, but not here. Save those tears for your mother’s apron, it probably tastes better anyway. 

DEBIT AND CASH ONLY 

Smoke's Poutinerie 
255 King Street North 
Waterloo, ON, N2J 2Y8 

T 519 888 7665 

Mon-wed 11am-11am 
Thu 11am-3am 
Fri-Sat 11am-4am 
Sun 11am-9pm

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