A&W – Michael Eats

Blue Buffalo Chicken from Bobbie Sue’s Mac + Cheese

I’ve tried Bobbie Sue’s Mac + Cheese a couple of times and enjoyed it quite a lot. Alas, this visit wasn’t quite as stellar. I had the Blue Buffalo Chicken, which features chicken and Buffalo sauce mixed right in with the pasta, and crumbles of blue cheese on top. It’s a tasty combo, and it certainly wasn’t bad — but the pasta was overcooked, the whole thing was weirdly soupy, and it wasn’t evenly heated (the edges were piping hot, and the middle was surprisingly cold). Hopefully it was just an off day, because my last couple of visits were actually pretty special.

Beer and Brown Bread ice cream from Bang Bang

Beer and Brown Bread is a flavour that’s been popping up on Bang Bang’s menu for years, though for whatever reason I hadn’t tried it until now. It’s… weird! The ice cream itself is actually not that sweet, and captures the beer flavour with unnerving accuracy (it’s fairly bitter, like an IPA). It took me a while to warm up to it, but once you wrap your mind around it, it’s actually quite good. It’s also got somewhat crispy pieces of brown bread mixed in, which complements the beer flavour of the ice cream quite well.

Chocolate Turnover made with KitKat from A&W

Not much to say about this one — it’s a fried pie filled with chocolatey goo, with little crispy bits interspersed throughout. I feel like any fried pie is going to be tasty, and yeah, it’s good. The combo of the crispy exterior and crispy bits within adds some nice texture, and the chocolatey goo is satisfying. The whole thing is a bit too sweet and doesn’t quite have the punch of chocolate flavour that you’re hoping it might, but I still quite enjoyed it.

Location: 1130 Dundas Street East, Mississauga
Website: http://www.aw.ca/

A&W recently added a Beyond Meat burger to its menu; the company that makes these things calls them “the future of protein,” and word on the street is that it tastes surprisingly close to the real deal.

Veggie burgers that try to emulate actual beef are pretty much always disgusting (case in point: Doomie’s, a restaurant that actually specializes in vegan food but still manages to serve a vegan patty that tastes like pure, distilled sadness), so I was curious, but my expectations were about as low as it gets.

Well, maybe that helped, because the Beyond Meat burger? Not terrible!

I know, “not terrible” isn’t exactly high praise, but since I was expecting this to be an all-out disaster, I’m going to chalk that up as a win.

The biggest giveaway that this isn’t an actual hamburger is the texture — though it’s vaguely meaty, it’s also off-puttingly mushy. But it wasn’t dry or rubbery, so it certainly could have been worse.

(Yeah, I completely mangled the hamburger — it turns out wooden coffee stir-sticks are an absolutely horrible implement to cut a burger in half. Lesson learned!)

The taste was a bit better than the texture. It wasn’t beefy at all — but then the actual beef at most fast food joints doesn’t have a particularly beefy flavour. The flavour is sort of generically meaty in a way that’s not great, but also not altogether unpleasant. The burger is absolutely doused in ketchup, mustard, and mayo, which helps make it more palatable.

It probably isn’t going to fool anyone other than longtime vegetarians who have forgotten what a burger tastes like, and I don’t think I’d ever order it again, but I was still impressed at how non-gross it was. I’d easily take it over the actual beef burgers at really bottom-of-the-barrel places like Hero Certified Burgers or Burger King.

Tag: A&W

Quick Bites: Bobbie Sue’s Mac + Cheese, Bang Bang, A&W

Beyond Meat Burger at A&W