Ch-Ch-Changes

Everyone who’s anyone knows about the Huether Hotel, an ambiguous grab-bag for all the restaurants that actually make up its space, the Barley Works being one such assemblage. Now, my eating there may even be old hat for all you eaters, and I’d be apt to let you all assume that as the students, you all are becoming the masters of places to eat, but let me assure you, this is not yet the case. So, why the visit to a place so well known in the city’s conscious? To the point, the menu has changed and separated itself from humble pub familiars to food with a more cosmopolitan tone. Yes, things are changing. The only way to see it may be by reading the bankable menu, rewritten to seduce you with urbane imagery and sellable artisanal rituals which, for some reason, make us all think the food tastes so much better. That and, of course, trying the food. You certainly won’t know by stepping in the place. The atmosphere hasn’t changed, so I won’t bore you culinary confidants with the details. But, if you are a little inexperienced, here’s a brief blow by blow: sports bar, tvs, exposed brick, lions’ heads, plaques, red pipes, popular patio, always filled in the summer. Good.  If it pleases you, you can spend a little, or you can spend a lot. A satisfying meal will run you between 10 and 20 dollars, though the appetizers seem as expensive as entree meal options. The menu runs the gamut, not necessarily specialized, but not sabotaging either: from soups to salads to hamburgers, pasta, schnitzel, and steak, you can have it all. I may have very well ate more, but I spent all of my personal allowance on bottomless hot pot for an expatriated Taiwanese news anchor turned self-effacing business man, bless his hardworking heart. Thus, I settled for an unabashed bison burger, a meat that seems unsuited to the wilds of Waterloo, but a good test of the Barley Works potential. For dessert, I stuck with an old menu favourite, although new to me: a stout float. A pint filled with brownie, vanilla ice cream, and the house’s choice beer; maybe a familiarity to you, but a total surprise to me. Yes, young masters, I’m still learning.   My burger came to me settled snuggly beside a house salad made of iceberg lettuce, spinach and veiny red chard, with typical toppings like carrots, peppers, and croutons. Now, as far as I’m concerned, a salad’s a hard thing to do, and as a side a mere display to make you seem like you’re getting some money’s worth. Not the case here.  My burger, a charred round hugged by lettuce, tomato, caramelized onions, a sun dried tomato mayo, unfortunately lost, and jalapeno havarti cheese on a Kaiser with a soft character, was an avid eat. Not perfect, but nowhere near a failure. If I had any qualms with the thing they were nothing more than mere textural trivialities: a bun too big for a paddy that slid back and forth and eventually fell apart, caramelized onions too stringy and stubborn to easily break, and too little avocado spread. But aside from that, I couldn’t resist the paddy’s charred exterior, its maroon flesh, reminiscent of a medium well steak, and the rich primal urge I had devouring the thing. I felt like a brute, but nothing short of satisfied. My stout dessert had the potential to be something great, if not for the hoppy beer it was paired with, not complimenting the sweetness of the ice cream, but only getting in the way of enjoying any contrast between sweet and heady. Fear not, if you are as gastronomically inclined as me, you could very well argue a choicer brew. And as for the brownie? Well, it’s a brownie; who would complain? Huether Hotel Lion Brewery Restaurant 59 King Street North, Waterloo, ON N2J 2X2 Phone: (519) 886-3350 Everyday 1130 am -1 am CASH CREDIT NO DEBIT

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Food Glorification

Look, Mom! I'm part of the media Hegemony.

The Works Gourmet Burger Bistro already has a reputation that precedes it. So when I say that I’m unexcited by the place, I don’t expect anyone reading to really pay me any mind. You can’t fight the Man, after all. Ironic, too. Especially for a place that hypnotically delivers a persona of society’s liminal degenerates. You know? The cool, laid back people that don’t get caught up in all that urbane ostentation? The kind of people that drink from Pyrex measuring cups and live in their parents’ sheds, listening to old Randy Newman? The admired burger eating Thureauvians who’ve attained personal autonomy by being ironic, or thinking they’re ironic and eating seemingly repulsive combinations that are not really bad. Well, The Works- as well as a little bit of the commodity fetish- makes you think you can too. It does it with its Brownfield, car-pot atmosphere; its visceral, oscillating menu of choices that make it a testament to the consumerist anxiety of too much choice. That is, it is as rhetorically transparent as glass. That is, everything on the menu could have easily been listed and customers could choose their toppings instead of having everything spoon fed to them. But what fun would some 6 burgers and 70 topping variations be? How else could the franchise pander with sophomoric highfalutin titles like ‘Limp Brisket’ and ‘Dare Ya Desserts,’ or the Othering and Orientalizing: ‘Sum Yung Guy’; let’s not forget “‘The Beat your meat’ Burger” for all those haggard masturbators who work up an appetite.

Crappy Tire. Crappy Burger.

Me? Well, as curious and intriguing as all the choices were, I opted for a tooth shattering, lung collapsing shake, blended with caramel, peanut butter, and Oreo cookie crumbs. With a consistency reminiscent of the glue we used to eat in our childhoods, but thicker, it was a wonder I drank as much as I did; too rich for the rocky road in my blood. And at the request of one herbaceous cohort, I opted for a meal as unfactory farmed as the place could manage:  a veggie burger with gluten free bun and sweet potato fries, transformed into what the menu aptly named, ‘The Crappy Tire.’ I can’t be more poignant than that in this instance. Set in front of me on what looked like an aluminum flowering pot- or trough- was a burger topped with a ring of pineapple, slice of balmy brie, whose odor rose generously to my nose, and a limp, flaccid, slice of lettuce, which I happily removed. The burger’s sweet and spicy sauce was nothing short of familiar, its sweetness overpowering and plumy, but nowhere near spicy at all. Sopping out, it eventually made the rubbery bun a slimy mess to eat. The pineapple was tender enough, and without any fibrous demure; and the brie? I can’t complain. But I can complain about the pliant demeanor of the paddy itself. A combination of parsley, onions and whatever other treacle is made to fashion a vegetarian paddy, it lacked the savoury notes I was looking for and made the whole thing a textural mess. The fries were okay; thinner than usual, but well suited to the stubborn nature of a yam’s creamy composure, making for a crunchy and smooth bite. 

Will I argue the price? No. Will I argue you don't want to pay for it? Yes. Because in a city that offers a lot of burgers and burger agency, I hope The Works isn’t depending on its franchise’s reputation, or quality control. But what does my opinion matter? I’m a 27 year old living with his mother.

The Works Gourmet Burger Bistro
(519) 885-6000
92 King Street South
Waterloo, Ontario

Everyday
11 a.m. - 10:00 p.m.

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The Raw and the Cooked

The Westmount Gastro Pub’s only hindrance may be its lack of signage. The restaurant depends solely on the name pasted to its front door to draw the undersized crowd that has been frequenting its space for the two months it’s been available to the public. Is there a strategy here? Is there a reason for no sign on a strip that boasts giant signs making customers aware of what lies in Westmount plaza’s sprawl? I’m too old and jobless to care about any semantic s; if the academy wasn’t a dying animal, maybe I’d put in the effort for a more consequential conclusion. I will say this, however: it’s a crying shame. The Gastro Pub makes a valiant effort to deliver good scratch to the palettes of our polis. I only hope the food it attempts to make from scratch doesn’t go unnoticed and spoil before it gets the privilege of feeding many more mouths. Word on the street is that’s what’s happening. A crying shame. It’s good. I dare say it’s delicious. The Gastro Pub plays the game well against the urbane restaurants already around. Its fare is familiar, but it diverges with a hodge-podge menu that offers interesting twists on meals we’re familiar with. A risotto with fresh ground lamb comes to mind. And the attempt at making everything from the most basic components an impressive foray. Hats off to The Gastro Pub; it does its best to exist as an appendage of Waterloo- trying to buy local, trying to be fresh, naming drinks after city streets. The first restaurant I’ve seen to rhetorically foster a sense of community with what it cooks. If it doesn’t succeed, it serves as at least a testament to the sad truth that Waterloo’s philistines don’t really care as much about the community as they say, and will disavow any sense of the word as soon as losing face is no longer a worry in front of their shameless social climbing peers. Hmph. My thesis was useful, after all. But no more academic tangents from this point on. There’s much more important matters to attest to, like the Pub’s food, and its space.

I have exhausted every way to describe an atmosphere like The Gastro Pub, simply because its persona borrows from the banal cosmopolitanism that dresses every haute food hole in this town. Black ceilings, brown everything else- the power suit colours of a restaurant space. It’s not a bad thing. I wasn’t repulsed sitting and eating. I liked feeling clean and pretending I was on business; but, the Pub’s mission statement of ‘a public house that specializes in serving quality food without pretension’ made it hard to stomach. And as playful as the bricolage menu is, it does very little to bolster any sentiment. The plating too. These appeals to humility only exist, paradoxically, as anti-aesthetic aesthetics, and make The Gastro Pub absolutely pretentious. But hey, the food was good, and the service even better.

If you’d like a little of everything, the sandwich options are a good choice, especially for those of us doing lunch, offering small tastings of sides like double-blanched French fries, or the daily soup. I went for something a little more ambitious, however; a main event; the beer can chicken: a slow roasted half-bird basted with Honey-Brown Lager. And though my first ordering relayed a poultry with an undercooked, bright pink flesh, my chef did everything a good restaurant does by footing the bill and delivering unto me an entirely new plate with the most tender bird and pastoral lavender meat, bone and all. Basted in beer, it gave off a nectarous aroma, reminiscent of the odours we find cooking with white wine. Any honey flavor imparted onto the chicken itself was slight, but perfectly suited to the mellowness of the meat. 

Accompanying that was a serving of sautéed vegetables, perfectly done as far as I’m concerned, with enough crisp zeal to teeter it on the edge of the raw and the overcooked. To that, I added fries, conventional in constitution, but accompanied with a homemade catsup full of texture, tongue tickling tang and fresh tomato to cool off any overpowering sweetness typical of the stuff we buy off of shelves. I would have liked the fries separate though, the juices from meat and vegetables running over them before I had a chance to enjoy any crunch.

For dessert I was treated to a buttery crème brulee with a side of wild blueberries simmered in their own sour juices. On a plate decorated with chocolate sauce and cinnamon, my buttery brulee, atypical to its boring custardy siblings, was left open to the option of adding even more levels of flavour. However, its soft-butter texture and down dulcet flavor made it a joy to eat all on its own, and did well enough without the ruddy wild berries. Its charred caramel was my favourite part, reminiscent of roasted marshmallows.

I have to admit, you’ve wowed me Gastro Pub, even after an embarrassing introduction; and I’d like to believe that’s a difficult thing to do. 

Aside from a jejune pretension and slow start, know this: I’m rooting for you.

One, dishonest photo this week. Why? The tyrants said I wasn't allowed to take photographs. True story.

The Westmount Gastro Pub

50 Westmount Rd.

Waterloo, ON

Mon- Fri: 11:30 am-10:00 pm

Sat-Sun: 11:30 am-10:00 pm

ANY PAYMENT

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