Restaurant Review. "Waiter, may I have a barf bag?"

I'll have a photo essay on the Grand Floral parade in the next day or so (I have some blurry photos to weed through) so you've got that to look forward to (Yea! A reason not to commit suicide this week!) but until then I have a nice little story about our brunch excursion yesterday.

Considering the Roommate, Boytek and I woke up with one slight hangover each yesterday, we decided to go get some breakfast and bloody marys to take the edge off. Since it's so close to the house we decided to drive down up-and-coming Alberta Ave to find a trendy spot for some chow, hopefully in a pool of sunshine on a nice patio somewhere. Now I think Alberta needs a few more restaurants that are open for Sunday brunch, because there were not that many to choose from and the ones that were open had huge crowds of people milling about at on the sidewalk out front, waiting for their tables. We decided to hit the Tin Shed, the food is reasonable and the cocktails generous, so we headed in to add a name to the wait list. Which was quite long. Extremely long but what the heck, there weren't that many other options so we got on the wait and decided to do some window shopping to kill time. We walked up the street several blocks, looking in store windows and then what the heck, let's get a cup of joe. We managed to kill quite a bit of time at the coffee shop since it took about 20 minutes to make the Roommate's latte. He was standing at the counter waiting for it when a waitress plopped down a tray of blue berry muffins, fresh out of the oven, right in front of him. It's a good thing he bought one because little did we know it would be quite some time before we'd be eating.

After a half hour passed we thought it best to head back to the restaurant to check on the wait list's progress. There were quite a few more people hanging out in front of the café but we assumed we would be called and ushered to our seats any minute now. After some time passed there was room on the bench under the front window so we sat down and waited. And waited, all the while the Roommate chanted "After this group, we're next" over and over again. When the Roommate's name followed by "party of three" was finally called we made our way to the patio area. Hmmm, our table was not bathed in a pool of sunlight as we had hoped, it was on the covered patio, but that was fine, an hour and ten minutes was plenty long enough a wait for a table, no reason to wait even longer.

So we sat waiting for our waiter. And we waited. When he finally showed up we had all already decided on our breakfast choices, having had plenty of time to read the entire menu several times over. And the Mercury. And War and Peace and the Bible as well. We ordered our bloody marys and food. And waited. Finally the drinks came and since there was celery in the bloody marys we at least we had something to eat since it was an hour from when we sat down to when we got our food, which was marginal at best. And to add insult to injury, as I cut into my potatocake I was shocked to find a hair. And not just a regular, everyday hair, but a short one that looked suspiciously like a pube. I was trying to convince myself that maybe it was one of the hippy-girl waitress's arm pit hair, but that didn't make me feel very much better. But fear not, there may have been a hair in my potatoes, but at least the Tin Shed did better this visit than my last, which was about six months ago when I found broken glass in my mimosas; at least they only grossed me out this time as opposed to possibly causing bodily harm.

So, rating for Tin Shed this visit? D minus minus. That was 3 hours of my life that I'll never get back and I was sickened by the hair and lackluster food. Thank god the waiter comped my meal, but you better believe I won't be visiting that establishment anytime soon. I'm thinking two strikes and you're out, this go 'round. Sorry Charlie, game over.