The Tame Fox

Wayfaring for food with Joey has once again taken me to the farthest reaches of the region’s culinary landscape. But dread not fellow eaters, because I still managed to keep my iron stomach in town, though this particular place may be a ways in our culinary pond. Still, if you are like me, the chancing culinary type, you would risk wandering somewhere far for something potentially good, as Joey and I do, and always seem to be doing lately, our meandering mouths aptly choosing a place that suits the wilds its situated in. I’m talking about the Rabbid Fox. Not particularly wild, but in the wilds of Kitchener, as wild and suburban as things can admittedly get. And as wild as the place allows its actual essence to be, its selling point being that, as rabid as the fox is, it has a ‘twist.’

The flushed aroma of beer hit us hard, and the patrons at the bar would have otherwise intimidated us if we hadn’t been, by some act of Providence, dressed for the occasion. Yes, Joey and I fit in well, what with his handle bar mustache and my thermal undershirt button-front combo. But that’s enough small talk.

There’s nothing particularly rabid about the Rabbid Fox, unless you consider its attempt at pretension, because behind its manifesto one will discover, as I did immediately walking through its proletariat sports bar decorated with lethargic, unwincing browns, hockey jerseys, and flat screens commingling with a dining section that can only remind a person of those large mysterious mansions we see while driving in the countryside, no doubt belonging to misanthropic surgeons, that the Fox is just a gastro pub. Certainly, the butcher paper tablecloths and silverware combination cements the conception.
And, like all gastro-pubs, the Fox does everything it can to coalesce the best of the two rivaling sibling worlds that have existed ever since the birth of the Market. So much so, that the special of the day was escargot; combine that with poutine and you might have some sort of sibylline utopia. I’ll never know.
Nevertheless, you can have a hardy, but well thought out meal for just under 20 dollars. I can’t deny my interest in all of the things I wanted to combine on the menu, offering trivialities and house specials which did catch Joey and my fancies.

We started with the saganaki appetizer, a Greek cheese flambéed in an anise flavoured liquor, contrasting salty and sweet powerfully by way of melted, curdled cheese mellowing in a wonderfully reduced syrup of liquor. If we were patient, we would have taken our time to dip our flat breads in the stuff, but we were having too much fun piling cheese on bread and chewing away. I had to settle for dipping my knife in the stuff when all was good and done, it was that fantastic.

Next, I was misdirected by the waitress into trying the bar’s special Po’Boy sandwich, stacked with sliced beef, cheese, caramelized onions, deep fried pickles (the coup de grace), and a creole sauce. I had high expectations that fell too short for it, and all Po’Boy sandwiches in this town, because I’ve never really had one I’ve enjoyed, simply because they’ve never been done well. My bun was soft and warm, my beef, boiled, fatty and bland, which did no good to balance the textural quality of the bread. The caramelized onions too were weak and squeaky, with no real flavour. Half way through I found myself pulling out my deep fried pickles before they lost any composure, but I’m always a sucker for the things. I thought maybe the dipping sauce it came with was reason for its dull composure, but it just made it a salty mess, visually reminiscent of some oil spill somewhere. Too bad.

Now, the Fox’s locale may make eating there forgivable, but I can only hope my bad sandwich was the only bad undomesticated thing on the menu.

THE RABBID FOX
123 Pioneer drive, 
Kitchener, ON(519) 748-2404

Mon - Tue:     11:00 am - 11:00 pm
Wed - Sat:    11:00 am - 1:00 am
Sun:            11:00 am - 10:00 pm


PAYMENT: VISA MASTERCARD DEBIT CASH

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