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| - The giant flames at the front door are a bad omen, and for sure, Spice Route is embarrassing from beginning to end. It has no idea of what real modern Asian fusion is all about, and much of what it serves resembles bad take-out Chinese. If you actually want spice (or flavour), go somewhere else. The venue is typical "King Street-trying-to-be-LA": oversized, over-noisy, over-designed, over-rated, up itself but utterly without style. The waiters treat you like an innocent abroad, though I suspect few of them have been abroad, for example, to places like Australia where Asian fusion cuisine is setting astonishing new standards that - let's face it - are never really likely to hit King West. The main concern of our waiter was to hysterically over-hype the really bad food, without showing any real knowledge of either the appallingly confused menu or the drinks list. And while the designers clearly think that the large stylized image of skulls and bone fragments from what can only be the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia is "edgy", I just found it as tasteless as the food.
If you are unlucky enough to find yourself being fed or watered in this barn, try to escape before 10pm when the clothes you arrived in for dinner are no longer good enough, and the call girls and their pimps arrive to ply their trade (for Spice Route, read Spice Rack).
In sum, for those who take secret pleasure in Toronto at its tackiest and most clueless, be sure to follow the Spice Route.
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