Legs, Eggs, and TheBesty.com

Once upon a time this blog was devoted entirely to restaurant reviews and so, every now and again, I would opine at great length on the subject of eateries in the Victoria and Vancouver areas.  One such establishment was Paul’s Place Omelettery, a Vancouver breakfast spot I wrote about on June 21, 2010 seven short months after Largely the Truth went online.  In the four years since then, thoughts of the review had drifted completely away from the waking part of my mind into the unreachable ultraviolet range of consciousness where hides such apocrypha as “where I left my keys” and “every book I have ever read.”

Then, in May, nearing the end of a road trip spanning some 2800 miles and fifteen states, I awoke in my Hyannis, Massachusetts hotel to find I’d received an e-mail from TheBesty.com.  The Besty is a new site which encourages bloggers to create and share lists of the best restaurants in their cities and elsewhere.  In February I had contributed a list of Waikiki hotspots culled from a recent visit and something about my hodgepodge of pizza joints and ice cream parlors must have caught their eye, because the email I received on that Cape Cod morning advised me a video using material drawn from my review of Paul’s Place had gone online.

That video is embedded below.  Though it may not contain every Julianne Moore metaphor I have used, it certainly has my favorite.

Thanks to everyone at TheBesty.com for reading and supporting Largely the Truth! 

P.S – Though things have slowed down for me on the blogging front you can still find me on Twitter and, my newest obsession, Instagram:

Donut King & Coffee | 1200 Summit Drive | Kamloops, BC

This restaurant review is from 2011 and was originally published on "Hot, Fast, Dirty", a website I'd intended to be for 500-word-or-less reviews of independent and lesser-known fast food joints.  HFD has long since been closed and I've gradually been migrating the content to this site.  As with all my food writing, you'll be able to find this and other reviews on the Restaurant Review Index.

Every time I pass through the town of Kamloops another outcropping of buildings has sprung up along the highway like mushrooms after a rain storm.  Mostly big-box stores and chain restaurants, they share other qualities with mushrooms as well: for example, local pulp mills mean that the areas in which they grow smell  not unlike excrement and eating at the wrong one will twist your stomach into such knots that you will beg heaven for the sweet deliverance of death.  Sadly for you, God does not hear prayers in the desert.

The Donut King in Kamloop's Sahali neighborhood isn't far from exit 369 (Columbia Street) off the Trans-Canada Highway and when I arrived there after a long day on the road I felt I had earned a treat.  The look of the building isn't miles off that of Tim Hortons and, if I recall correctly, the building which houses this Donut King (there are 2 more in other parts of town) was once home to the Kingdom of the Rolled Rim.  Inside, the comparisons were hard to ignore and I had to assume that the owners had chosen "Donut King" because "King Tim's" was a bit too obvious, as was the slightly more inflammatory "F*ck You, Horton".

Somebody gonna get sued

The selection was a good deal more varied than Tim Hortons, with butter & raisin tarts, small round cherry cheesecakes & three kinds of cream tarts (banana, lemon, blueberry).  They had more standard offerings like cruller, longjohns, and a TimBit knock-off called DK-ee's, among other things.  I went with a cherry cheesecake ($2.99), something called a "What Am I?" (90¢) which looked like a Boston Cream donut wearing a golf cap, some kind of vegetable wrap served with hoisin sauce and one Old Fashioned Glaze DK-ee (I'm on a diet, man).

What the hell are you?

The DK-ee was dry and unpleasant - like eating a mothball - but the "What Am I" and cherry cheesecake were both solid choices.  "What Am I" had a cream filling of pleasant but indeterminate flavour which was, I suppose, the point and the cherry cheesecake - a New York-style cheesecake in a tart shell - was too rich to finish on my own but was enjoyable nonetheless.  As for the vegetable wrap - I don't know what the hell it was doing there or, more to the point, what it was doing on my plate but it was good as far as these things go.  Still, it was more out of place than Carrot Top at the Apollo Theatre.

Tim Hortons has, for some reason or another, become enmeshed with Canada's national identity.  I don't think the empire of the Donut King poses a serious threat to that but with better coffee and donuts made fresh in house they're a nice alternative.

The Moon Under Water Pub & Brewery | 350B Bay Street | Victoria

Update February 26, 2013:  The Moon Under Water is still open but under new management.  I haven't been in a year and a half so can't say how this has affected the quality of the food and beer.

There is no end of talk here in North America about the “English Pub Experience”.  We imagine quaint little buildings in the country where rumpled men in patched jackets talk about the weather, the footie, and make off-color jokes about their wives.   Where a barman with rolled-up sleeves serves pints of nameless “lager”, “ale” and “bitter” from great brass taps and sets them down on the dark, polished bar.  If a disagreement should arise it can be settled with a game of darts or, if absolutely necessary, a gentlemanly bout of fisticuffs outside after which the winner helps the loser to his feet and then buys him a drink.

Come in, have a laugh, get stabbed.

When I was living in England with Nicky the television liked to remind us that “country pubs” were closing at about the rate of one a day.  In the pubs that remain you are more likely to find teenagers in short skirts screeching football songs than you are anyone who wants to talk about the weather.  The barman is still there but he’s pouring out pints of Budweiser, Carling and Strongbow Cider to ratfaced men with wispy moustaches and the social graces of fire ants.  If he can be bothered to put down his mobile phone long enough to work the taps, that is.  Disagreements, if they arise, are settled with a knife in your back, or if absolutely necessary, a savage kicking outside by a group of hoodied jackals, one of whom will use his mobile phone to record the event for posterity. 

It makes me wonder where The Moon Under Water fits into all this - advertised as an “English-style” pub it doesn’t look or feel particularly English and the menu is caught somewhere between the Old & New Worlds.  It’s neither Coronation Street nor Clockwork Orange but the food is hearty and filling and their session ales are the best English beers I’ve tasted in the three years since coming home.

Fernwood Inn | 1302 Gladstone Avenue | Victoria

The small neighborhoods, or villages, that dot Victoria are one of the city's hidden charms.  Some are more interesting than others, James Bay Village in particular feels like an open air home for the elderly and the boring, but with a range of independent businesses and often unique architecture they all have their own appeal. Fernwood Village always seems peaceful, rather than boring and at midday that's a welcome change from downtown and the rush of Blackberry-wielding power suits who pull down six figures but have all the social graces of water buffalo.

The Village Idiot Bar & Grill | 306 Mackenzie Avenue | Revelstoke, B.C

What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet.  But just look at a rose: it’s lovely, red (I know there are other colours, but those are only for your grandmother), and it can buy you out of almost any trouble you’ve caused.  This is based on a sliding scale, from a single rose “just because”, to several dozen, “just because I crashed your car while playing slap and tickle with your sister”.  The rose is invincible to degradation, even if you call it “Duane Allman’s gangrenous foot”. 

Other things are not so lucky, and were they to have their names changed, their image would suffer accordingly.  Imagine, for instance, that during a moment of intimacy with your lady, you glance downward and ask if she wants to meet “The Ringing Disappointment”, or “Fester”.  Will her answer be a breathy “Oh yes”, or would your bed empty faster than a church pew when Father Flynn passes the plate?  If you named your restaurant “The Village Idiot”, would anyone take it seriously?

Baan Thai | 1117 Blanshard Street | Victoria

UPDATE, September 2010:  I've returned to Baan Thai several times and had meals that are vastly superior to the one described here.  I have now happily climbed aboard the Baan Thai bandwagon.  The Baandwagon?  I'm so sorry. 

I loathe buzzwords and the way they've penetrated popular language. An afternoon of coffee and biscuits in the Shoal Point Moka House can be ruined as soon as some goon drops a phrase like "Derek, we need to drill-down and start pushing the envelope". My heart beats faster, the adrenaline flows and I swell, Incredible Hulk style, to a towering giant of rage that wants to hit Chet & Derek so hard their skin flies off. Instead I sit, eat my Hobknobs and die just a little bit more inside.

"Global village" is another one that never fails to rile me, long-hair shorthand for the way telecommunications & travel have brought the many cultures of the world closer together. Not usually mentioned is that after being brought together they're split up like British children in wartime, shuffled into unmarked van and then then co-opted by people too lazy to develop personalities of their own. Growing up in Revelstoke, B.C. where ethnic food began & ended at Tony's Roma, I never learned to differentiate between one type of food and another. You ate at Tony's because his cannelloni was legendary and it was the only restaurant in town that sold anything other than hamburgers. There was never any particular value assigned to the fact that the style of cooking originated in the ancestral home of the pompadour.

Now I walk past The Noodle Box and see crowds of surly, humorless university students tucking into overcooked Asian food prepared by surly, humorless university graduates, everyone toe-top-full with pride at their culinary diversity. I cannot prove this, but it seems unlikely that deep in the hills of Vietnam, Hmong villagers sit down at meal-time to high-five one another over platefuls of hamburgers.

And so it begins...

Hello Victoria - we're Max & Bren, and we have a few things to say about your restaurants. We're fairly recent arrivals in your fair city and have spent a not-inconsiderable amount of money in many of your eateries, some of it was well-spent, some of it was spent in the Irish Times. The end result is that we've added a few inches to our waistline and we have a compulsion to add our opinions to this swirling mess of mediocrity called the Internet. Other than one being a vegetable and the other a bunch of fruits, we couldn't tell you the difference between endive and N'Sync but we sure can tell you whether or not we liked something, why, and if a restaurant is worth your hard-earned money. We're hoping to have an update for you every two weeks and we look forward to seeing what you've got to say. Let's have some fun with this.

Let's go.