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| - I agree with my esteemed reviewing colleague Vanessa G. This place is grim, dark and strangely desperate. I can recommend it only to those returning from a long sea voyage with nothing to their name except gift certificates to this place. (Sometimes pirates pay out in gift certificates, I hear.)
Anyway, the decor is old and faded and vinyl; ambiance is non-existent. The food, for its part, is somewhere between semi-edible and uninteresting and while the service is with a smile, it's nothing to write home about.
It dawned on me as I ate there that everyone in the restaurant, staff and patrons alike, looked a bit glum - as if we were in a Siberian Gulag kitchen in the winter of 1921, doomed to another six months without sunlight, wrapped in used medical bandages (used by others) for warmth.
Yes that's it! Imagine someone transplanted a prison from last-century Siberia, added a bit of Pseudo-Country Flavour and plunked it all down in Mid-Town Toronto. Not good. I half expected the library ghost from Ghostbusters to appear in one of the dark recesses of this place, paging through War and Peace - a novel as tedious as the restaurant itself. Dostoyevsky himself would give the place a look and decide it was TOO depressing.
I suppose I shouldn't expect much seeing as this place's specialty is its beer, not its food. But come on - you've got restaurant in the name...let's renovate once every 37 years and maybe shake up the kitchen a bit, shall we? That's a nice restaurant. Don't cry! There there. One day you'll fix yourself up! (Or close down)
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