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| - Ah, the hated and often irrelevant "This is a brunch review" review.
Now, I'm usually not one to stop and eat somewhere with a brunch menu, but we were walking by and they had a burger, so I figured it'd be a safe bet.
Wrong.
I asked for my burger cooked rare and our waitress claimed they don't grind their meat in-house so they cook it to medium-well.
The issue here isn't that they "don't grind it in house" -- the issue is that Origin clearly doesn't take enough pride in its menu to buy good meat daily. There are wholesalers and butchers who will supply restaurants with fresh ground beef. I've been to plenty of high-end restaurants and dive bars that can cook their burgers rare, and I'm sure not *all* of them were grinding meat in-house.
You can't charge $16 for a burger when every second hole-in-the-wall churns out a respectable patty for $7 these days, and every other $16 burger in the city is some sort of dry-aged, fresh-ground custom blend. It's lazy and evinces a completely indifferent attitude towards customers -- I can just imagine the thought that went into putting the burger on the menu: "Well, we need something that isn't 'brunch food' and everyone else is serving high-end hamburgers these days, so let's just go buy some meat from Loblaws and put a $16 price tag on it since dudes who don't want poached eggs will have no other choice."
Anyways, as alluded to above, I didn't want poached eggs so I was shit out of luck for everything else on the brunch menu except the grilled cheese, which apparently is just Kraft Singles (billed as "cheddar cheese") and white bread. Not knowing any better, I asked the waitress if it was a sharp cheddar and she told me "Not really." She should have told me the truth, that the cheese is Kraft Singles. And if it wasn't, then it was some other cheap processed cheese. Same story as the burger -- crappy bread, crappy cheese, absolutely no discernible effort.
Maybe their cocktails are good but I wouldn't know since they never brought the Caesar I ordered. The spanish fries side dish, however, was great.
Overall just horrible. I had wanted to go for dinner, and while I know the menu and atmosphere are different, I have a hard time believing they suddenly put that much more effort into it. Lunch was only $48 and it felt like the biggest ripoff of my life.
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