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| - Reading the reviews on the Yelp page, I feel like I must have gone to the wrong restaurant! I hate to come onto Yelp to trash a restaurant, but I wonder if the chef was off the day that I came in for lunch? That being said, this was one of those truly remarkable dining experiences that astounded me at every turn...
Let me set the scene briefly: my parents were visiting for the weekend and were on a mid-afternoon flight out of Toronto. Although my office is near Yorkville, I never venture past the local sausage proprietor A colleague of mine suggested that I just wander around Yorkville looking for a place to grab a bite, and that I "couldn't go wrong". It was that miserable snowy day where it rained in the afternoon and turned the entire streets to slush. Have I evoked enough melodrama yet?
Anyways, we sat down and ordered. My Mom went for a starter - some sort of fried chicken dish with a coleslaw, my Dad, the lentil dish, and I went for the burger. We also agreed (after much pushing from our waitress) to get the arugula and grapefruit salad. The food arrived quickly and looked pretty (if slightly larger than we had anticipated) on the plate. High marks for presentation. HOWEVER, tucking into the food, it was remarkable how terrible every dish was. My burger, to start, was completely over cooked and the "bacon aioli" (a condiment that seems to tap into the cultural zeitgeist at various levels) was nowhere to be found. I was left with a chewy and greasy burger that was completely bland, but I got off easy. My Dad's artichokes were not cleaned properly and he found himself sifting through bits of toughness and grit. Also, his lentils were completely overcooked. I know what you're thinking: how does that happen? If there is any food that is resistant to overcooking it is the resilient and malleable lentil! Alas! So did we, but Sassafraz's chef demonstrated, definitively, that an overcooked lentil exists. Finally, his puff pastry was pliable and without any finesse or delicacy. My mom's "chicken dippers" (or whatever nomenclature du jour they use on their menu) were actually pretty tasty - crispy and salty. Her coleslaw, however, was unpalatable due to the bath of vinegar it was swimming in. Her celeriac puree that sat underneath also just tasted of, well, nothing. Finally, our shared arugula and grapefruit salad was the biggest joke of all. We received a huge mound of arugula with four sections of grapefruit at perpendicular angles and a few toasted cashews hidden beneath the bed of salad leaf. There was none of the "rhubarb citrus vinaigrette" and when we asked the waitress to bring us some, she returned with a dense, red-colored mayo and it was unclear how to dress the salad. In effect, we found ourselves staring down the business end of a $14 pile of arugula. The only excuse for food this absolutely bland is that the kitchen must have run out of tasting spoons. Or maybe a new sous chef was being trained (this was, to be fair, 12:00 on a Monday)?
To give credit where credit is due, our waitress was attentive and the food did come quickly. That being said, the experience was almost a parody of service itself. I don't want to delve too far into meta territory here, but just as the menu seemed to try and capture certain elements of haute cuisine (cf. the "citrus roasted cauliflower" or "grapefruit gremolata"), our waitress also seemed to perform her role without any substantive backing. For example, when she asks how our food was, she didn't let anyone answer before saying "It's delicious, I can just tell from looking at you". She was also halfway to the bar telling my Mom "Let me get you another glass of that Cote du Rhone" before my Mom had to jump out of her chair and practically tackle her and tell her that "No, I need to stand in airport security". She was performing hospitality without any actual hospitality! I feel that this may have been part and parcel of the larger economic logic of Sassafraz. Our waitress, after pushing dessert on us for the third time, mentioned a "mousse dome" that she refers to as a "pleasure dome". I told her that this was clever and she looked at me said, "Oh, I know. It helps me sell a ton of them". This line was revealing. As a moment of critique of the neoliberalization of the food industry, it was poignant. Our waitress slipped from her performative role as "hostess" and unveiled the bare economic mechanics of the restaurant industry. In order to keep afloat, bloated and expensive (and, quite honestly, tacky) restaurants, waitresses are forced to up-sell drinks, desserts, etc. etc. and this is done through a feigned affective intimacy with each customer. It is a Janus-faced role: waitresses are forced to become both cut-throat saleswomen while also maintaing their affective bond.That being said, this didn't add much to our dining experience or shave off the $150 lunch bill.
All in all, I feel Sassafraz a prime contender for Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares.
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