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| - After being spurned at Beerbistro because they were "too crowded", I looked on Yelp for another highly rated place nearby and discovered Hawthorne. It was early on a Saturday evening and I was freezing cold and it was nearby so I made the scary trip down Richmond Street a couple of blocks past Yonge to the restaurant.
I sat at the bar and was promptly greeted by an enthusiastic young lady (who I took to be a manager of some type). I ordered a cocktail, which she prepared expertly. It was called Sexing the Cherry or something like that and it was quite good. I asked what the cut of the day was for the steak frites and she didn't know and she asked two line cooks and they didn't know, but finally found out. Several minutes later when one of the guys came up and told her the cut, she was kind of snarky when she told him "You're 20 minutes too late with that". As I was sitting right there and witnessed the exchange, it made me uncomfortable.
The food was okay. I see people raving about it but I'm not there. The steak that night was more like roast beef, which is fine but I would have preferred something like a skirt steak. It was cooked well but the sauce/gravy on it was sweeter than I would have liked and tasted like a mass-market bottled sauce that had some extra spices thrown into it. Fries were fine although the accompanying sauce was also very sweet.
For dessert I had the Elvis, which sounded good on paper but was only so-so in execution. It consisted of banana bread, three tiny squirts of some fruity sauce, powdered peanut butter and some carmelized bacon-banana brittle. That last part was outstanding. However, the banana bread, which was grilled, in combination with the powdered peanut butter and the inadequate amount of "jelly" left the dessert feeling very dry. Luckily I had another bottle of their wonderful seltzer with which to wash it down.
Service was on point the whole night, but it seemed very scripted. It was as if someone had read a book by Danny Meyer or something and then tried to re-create that. It was textbook good, but it seemed to be missing warmth and sincerity. The right things were said and done because those were the right things to say and do, not because they were actually felt. It's hard to explain but the whole thing left me a little cold.
I think this has potential to be a four-star place, but when I looked back at other restaurants of this ilk which I rated four stars, this just isn't quite there yet.
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