PaiGu

Sen5es Bakery & Restaurant is located on the ground floor of the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel in downtown Toronto. I’ve only ever read glowing reviews of this fine-dining establishment, so I readily accepted an invitation to go for a Summerlicious dinner this past Friday.

Three and a half hours and $60 later, I walked out with only two good things to say about the place: the servers are courteous and the washrooms are clean.

We had a reservation for 7:00 pm but were cooling our heels in the lobby until 8:00 pm. Unacceptable.

It took another 40 minutes for our first course to come. Granted, we had a party of 12, but we were all ordering off the Summerlicious menu, so they could expect the volume ahead of time (and everyone knows its pre-made anyway), so how long does it take to arrange appetizers on 12 plates?

Grilled romaine lettuce heart tasted exactly like what you would expect romaine lettuce hearts to taste like. The portobello tasted bizarre, and not in a good way.

Gazpacho is a cold Spanish tomato-based vegetable soup. Given that it was a vegetable soup, I wasn’t ready for the chill. It tasted fine, nothing to write home about. The half-cherry tomato came with goat cheese, which was not on the menu. Kind of a big deal, I’m surprised they didn’t put that on there given how they like to put every single ingredient on the menu. Lobster medallions tasted like they’d been frozen and then thawed, but what did I expect? I don’t know, maybe something fresh from such a “fine-dining” establishment. » Read the rest of this entry «

A La Kitchen is located behind First Markham Place and features Shanghai-style cuisine. When we arrived before noon on Sunday, it was absolutely packed, and we had to wait for a table among pushy groups of Cantonese families. Although a packed restaurant is a good sign, I wasn’t too pleased that I couldn’t hear a single word of Mandarin. Was this really Shanghai-nese cuisine, or was it another one of a hundred Cantonese-Chinese restaurants in the area?

The restaurant is less than five years old, so the interior was still in good shape. However, they had tried to cram so many people inside that all the aisle space was taken up and chairs were back-to-back. I am pretty sure that’s a fire hazard, but nobody seemed to care. » Read the rest of this entry «

Guu Izakaya opened its doors in Toronto on December 18, 2009. Since then, Ryerson campus dwellers, the work crowd, Toronto foodies, and Vancouver expats have been pouring through its doors non-stop. From the exterior (and from the usual hour-long line-up outside its doors), the restaurant looks more like an exclusive club than a Japanese “pub”. Izakayas in Japan are affordable watering holes that also serve food for salarymen to hit up before going home. However, when I dragged my own crowd of two Vancouver and one Ottawa expats to Guu on a Saturday night¹, we were mostly interested in the food.

As soon as I pulled open the massive wooden door to its entrance, I was greeted with a loud and energetic chorus of irashaimase! from all over the restaurant. I was temporarily shell-shocked and froze in the entrance way, literally too dazed to take another step. Was this a restaurant? Was I still in Toronto? The warm, lively, chaotic scene before me seemed a world away from the wet, cold, windy, and empty street I had just left. I spotted my friends at the bar and quickly joined them.

The restaurant was not very large, but they seemed to have somehow fit a hundred people inside. The commotion of the Japanese chefs behind the bar, along with everyone else in the place, made it so loud I found it difficult to hear myself speak. Every few seconds, the entire staff would shout a chorus of Japanese together, and I would again be shocked into a daze. It took us a long time to order as the shouting made it hard to focus on the menus in front of us. Time here also seemed to go at a faster pace than the outside world. Our server came by four times before we were ready to order – it seemed like we were taking a long time when in reality, we took no more than twenty minutes. When we finished our meal (in a rather timely fashion I would say), we realized we had maxed out our two-hour time limit, but it felt like no time at all. » Read the rest of this entry «

1. It seems that weekends are not as busy as weekdays. Guu is open daily from 5 pm to midnight; if you go before 6pm, there usually isn’t a line-up. After 6 pm, on a weekday, the wait can be up to two hours. [↩]