review – Page 26 – Michael Eats

Eggs Benedict (?) at Smash Kitchen

Published on March 27, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 4261 Highway 7, Unionville
Website: http://www.smashkitchen.com/

Is eggs benedict still eggs benedict if you don’t include the hollandaise sauce? Traditionally, that dish consists of an english muffin topped with meat (usually ham or bacon), a poached egg, and hollandaise.

That’s four things; the hollandaise is 25 percent of the dish. How far can you change something until it’s no longer that thing? Is it still spaghetti and meatballs if you replace the tomato sauce with alfredo? Probably not!

Which is to say that I just ordered the Smash Benedict from Smash Kitchen, and they replaced the hollandaise with gravy. To be fair, they also have a traditional eggs benedict on the menu, so that does kinda give them license to mess around with it in their other offerings.

The problem is, I missed the hollandaise. This particular benedict featured an english muffin topped with pulled pork, cheese, the standard poached egg, and the aforementioned gravy. The pulled pork was tossed in a very vinegary barbecue sauce that, while tasty, absolutely dominated the dish.

A heaping serving of creamy hollandaise might have helped to cut the vinegary sharpness of the pork, but the gravy was completely lost. It may as well have not even been there. I had to eat most of this with some hash browns to help mellow out that strong barbecue sauce flavour.

Still, it certainly wasn’t bad, and the crispy fried hash browns were a very tasty accompaniment. But if I came back, I’d probably just stick with the classic benedict (there was also a crab cake benedict that looked tasty, and yes — that one had hollandaise on it).

Felix & Norton Frozen Cookie Disappointment

Published on March 22, 2018March 22, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

I used to love Felix & Norton. Their Unionville location was in a plaza right across from where I went to high school, so cookies were a regular occurrence. I remember them being some of the best store-bought cookies around: lightly crispy and chewy, with a really great buttery flavour and high-quality chocolate chunks.

So when I saw unbaked Felix & Norton cookies in the freezer section at a local Loblaws, I couldn’t get them in my cart fast enough.

And it’s not a bad deal: nine bucks for a 500 gram bag, which works out to about 20 cookies. I got Menage a Trois, which features cookies with white, milk, and dark chocolate chunks.

Alas, these weren’t the Felix & Norton cookies I remembered. The chunks were more like tiny chocolate fragments, and barely added any chocolate flavour at all. The cookies were just blandly sweet. They were also insanely greasy, and yet had almost zero buttery flavour.

They weren’t the worst things ever, I guess — they were certainly better than something like Chips Ahoy, but they’re not even close to being in the same league as what you can get at the store.

Nashville Hot Chicken at Porchetta and Co.

Published on March 17, 2018March 17, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 545 King Street West, Toronto
Website: http://porchettaco.com/

I love Porchetta and Co. Their porchetta sandwich? Classic. Best porchetta in the city. Their fried chicken sandwiches? Usually delicious! Their Nashville hot chicken sandwich? Uh…

Hey, they can’t all be winners. And it wasn’t all bad. The fried chicken itself was superlative, as usual: perfectly-cooked chicken with a crispy, crunchy, tasty exterior. It’s good stuff.

Nashville hot chicken is a notoriously spicy dish that involves a post-cooking dunk into spice-infused oil to give the chicken additional flavour and heat. It’s typically sprinkled with more spices, just to kick up the heat factor. Porchetta and Co. appear to have remembered the oil — the sandwich was absolutely dripping with it — but forgotten the spices. The oily coating on the chicken was bland, and worse, it wasn’t spicy. At all. The spice level here never registered beyond a mild tingle. WTF?

The other components of the sandwich — lettuce, mayo, pickles, plain white bread — were fine, though the sugary-sweet pickles were a bit overpowering.

Sausage Perfection at Wvrst

Published on March 15, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 609 King Street West, Toronto
Website: http://www.wvrst.com/

I tried Wvrst once, around when it first opened. It was good, but nothing about it really jumped out at me, so I never felt particularly compelled to go back.

Well, I just found myself back there, and clearly I was wrong about the place, because the sausage I ate was probably one of the best that I’ve ever had.

They have an intimidatingly long list of sausages on their menu. I got the Kaas: “pork/beef/parrano cheese/light smoke.” You can either get it on a bun or as currywurst. I went with a bun, and had it topped with sauteed onions and jalapenos.

Oh man, that sausage. The texture was absolutely perfect. To me, the meat in a sausage needs to retain some of its essential meatiness; it shouldn’t have been ground into oblivion. It should still be sausagey, of course, but the texture should be more rustic than a hot dog. Wvrst absolutely nails this.

And the flavour was great: meaty and smoky, not overly salty, and with surprisingly generous pockets of gooey, melty cheese. I was actually pretty blown away by how good it was.

I got the duck fat fries on the side, and they were just as good. You could pick from a bunch of dipping sauces; I went with the Wvrst sauce (rule of thumb: if something on the menu is named after the restaurant, you should probably be ordering that thing). It was tangy and delicious, and complimented the fries perfectly.

Milkshake Disappointment at the Hershey Store

Published on March 10, 2018March 10, 2018 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

There’s a Hershey store in Niagara Falls, and I have a pretty vivid memory of the chocolate milkshake there being amazing.

Granted, this was at least a decade ago, but when I recently found myself in Niagara Falls with some time to kill, I got very excited by the prospect of having this milkshake again.

In my memory, this was a superior milkshake with a surprisingly intense chocolaty flavour. I’ve never been a fan of Hershey chocolate, but this milkshake was something else. It was special.

Well, either I’m way wrong about this or it’s gone way downhill, because the milkshake was not good at all. It was throat-burningly sweet, and it didn’t even have much of a chocolaty flavour. It was just all-encompassing sweetness. It was bad.

I got about halfway through, ate the Hershey’s Kiss on top (which tasted like nothing after the mouth-annihilating sweetness of the milkshake), then chucked the rest in the garbage.