Cause if I stumble then I fall
and get back up
Try to brush the dust off
And everything is black
when I close my eyes
I lose all sense of time
Another Tuesday, and at long last another Taste! Hopefully my replacement made up for my lengthy absence...
Speaking of tasty substitutions, this week as a grandiose return we're looking at a major clash of styles. A truly bizarre concoction perhaps dreamed up or conceived after an excessive amount of high school weed brownies. Nuts and gum, together at last! (Hey, I've been gone a while. Lots of Simpsons references to make up lost time for).
Harvey's is certainly no stranger to this review show. Last March they featured in the Great Canadian Veggie Burger Showdown, then later in August I tried their regular beef burger. On neither occasion did I sample and review their fries, however... and seeing as a poutine craving had been shaking my hand for multiple weeks... well 2 + 2 equals 22. Everyone knows that.
I'm a bit of a poutine snob (spending extended time in Montreal can do that) and while Toronto does have a few strong options (Nom Nom Nom in particular) I never considered any of the fast food chains remotely approaching that company. Back in my late teen years I remember KFC being decent, thanks to their salty pepper gravy submerging everything, but even that hollow train sailed straight into the ocean a long time ago (trains don't float, after all... unlike KFC fries).
I'll give Harvey's some credit that other burger joints, like Burger King or A&W, don't get: they're willing to experiment with their poutine toppings. One of my top poutine spots in Montreal, the great La Banquise, has some truly absurd creations involving anything from pepperoni, guacamole, Swiss cheese, creamy coleslaw, apples(!), corn dogs, Caesar dressing, fried pickles, mac'n'cheese... plus the usual pulled pork, smoked meat, bacon, steak, onion, mushroom etc options. It's true decadent madness, I tells ya. While nowhere near that level of insanity, Harvey's does offer some unusual combinations. There's the basic one (fries, curds, gravy), then a double cheese with bacon, a chicken and bacon one drizzled with ranch (no thanks), and then the buffalo chicken offering you see above. A total of four isn't exactly a pinnacle of selection, but I'll give some points for trying to be interesting instead of just "add bacon".
"Interesting" doesn't mean "it works", so lets dive into this thing. It's been probably over a decade since I'd had a poutine from Harvey's at all, and I gotta say the basic fundamentals were a pleasant surprise. The fries are lightly crispy, thankfully not over-seasoned and have that key "this actually tastes like a potato" factor. Fries are a consistently underrated aspect to poutine: you can load it up with the best whatevers but if the fries suck... your poutine is gonna suck too. Harvey's gravy... yeah, I'm into it. The richness is there (I suspect it's a mushroom gravy) and like the fries it's not aggressively salty, nor is it overly thin or watery. As for the cheese curds... serviceable. I appreciate that they're using actual curds (or a close proximity) instead of a shredded cheese cop-out... but these don't quite have that natural squeakiness you find among the truly great (Quebec) poutines.
Still, there's a good balance here between the three elements, the Poutine Triforce if you will. The gravy isn't weak slop drowning out everything, they didn't skimp out on the amount of cheese, and even the fries at the bottom of the box get some of that trickle down flavour action (it doesn't work in economics but it works for a quality poutine).
Now for the weirdness: the buffalo chicken presence. Like nuts and gum, upon the surface it seems like a classic case of combining two good things together unfortunately into something strange and awful. Whiskey and beer, together at last! I went into this expecting these flavours to clash, but also thinking "if the buffalo sauce is merely soaked into the chicken... maybe it works?" Well... the generosity of toppings extends into the buffalo sauce as well. It is prominent.
And yeah, it really doesn't work. No sir.
It's not exactly bad, just that the clash of flavours is incredibly strong and impossible to ignore. Back when I worked at the Friar and Firkin in downtown Toronto, our sandwich board special one day was a butter chicken mac n' cheese, a hybrid item I believe was only ordered by me that entire afternoon. Even our chef snickered upon seeing me engage it. Buffalo chicken on a poutine is similar: the sharp tang of the buffalo sauce doesn't mesh at all with the rich savouriness of a gravy surrounded by creamy clumps of cheese. Perhaps that's just my taste, I know people who like pickles on peanut butter sandwiches... but the contrast of flavours here is too much for me.
Imagine taste buds receiving two distinctly different signals simultaneously and the brain does not compute or approve. Hey, the chicken itself is quite tasty. Genuinely juicy chunks of stringy breast meat and very unlike any minced imitation chicken you find in nugget form... solid crunch to the breading also. The failure isn't because this lacks basic quality, that's for certain... and I appreciate that the more intense portions flavour-wise are distributed centrally (allowing one's fork to choose its own mis-adventure, as it were).
Overall... I cannot recommend this unless you have very specific tastes. Some may very well find the slightly hot acidity against heavy cheese, carbs and gravy an enjoyable contrast, or the weird buffalo-gravy sauce mix uniquely tasty. Not me, though. I will say I enjoyed the clashing combination more once the poutine was cold. I've always found eating a poutine is a race against time, since once it goes cold it's nearly impossible to resurrect it to respectable tastiness. However, Harvey's poutine once cold seemed to mute the aggressive aspects of the buffalo sauce. Not that it suddenly worked once cold but at least it wasn't a street fight in my mouth anymore.
One last thing: this is the burger chain that happily advertises you can "build your own" burger, right? They dress it right in front of you, and there are plenty of choices in both topping and sauce categories. Seems like a natural thing you could also do with a poutine, or even just plain fries. Just sayin' it's an idea is all.
Burnt Ends -- The usual features are back as well! While I haven't been writing any food reviews these past few months, West Collier hasn't been a ghost street either.
Deep into the lonely winter doldrums of January, I discovered a sequence of short chapters I'd written back in 2016 intended as a segment of a novel (the "Steckland" story perhaps some of you may know). Reading these vignettes again after six years, I thought maybe it could fly on its standalone serial. I hate giving too much away... the bare bones of it is a story/legend of a fictional rock star, alongside another parallel tale. Here are parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII and VIII. There's a flow to this story I like, as unbiased as I can possibly be, and each episode is quite bite sized. Check it out, I insist.
I've also been watching and reviewing Star Trek: Picard season 2... because these are the bad choices we make in life sometimes. Ugh. If you like reading me when I'm angry, confused and frustrated, check out my torture with Ep 1 - The Star Gazer; Ep 2 -- Penance; Ep 3 -- Assimilation, Ep 4 -- Watcher (on the shortlist of worst fucking Trek episode ever made) and Ep 5 -- Fly Me To The Moon. Or don't. Spare yourself while you can.
To finish, something positive to wash out that nasty taste of bad sci-fi writers french kissing themselves. I complied a comprehensive ranking of every Toronto pizza I've tried since undertaking the Endless Pizza Quest(TM) back in 2018. This particular piece just ranks in descending order each pizza I've tried, accompanied by a picture (and possibly a sentence long note if necessary). Man, I've had a lot of pizza. Check it out 'here!'
Tuesday Tune -- Aside from working a Maroon 5 show last August, I have not been to a concert since the Beforetimes. October 2019 to be exact (it was Wilco and it was awesome). I even used to write about this stuff, and still it became one of those things I didn't realize how much I missed it until it was gone... being able to see live music.
This upcoming Friday I'm seeing Sloan at The Phoenix, playing the entirety of their classic Navy Blues album. So... in honour of both a first attended show in three years, but more so honouring that truly excellent record... here's a great tune from said excellent record.
That's it for me. Hope you all enjoyed this Elvis-like comeback, we'll be back next week (also known as not four months from now) with another exciting, compelling, delicious, tantalizing platter of words to... I dunno... make you hungry? Until then, be well, be kind, and as always.... don't pull a Raptors and spill that goddamn mustard.
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