Our server was ultra-friendly and she brought coffee that easily transcended the near-ubiquitous underground lake quality we were getting used to.

The potatoes were excellent with herbs and onions, though in one instance they misspell potato and add an “e” on the menu. Not good, but given the place is called Charlee’s, they may be a little eeeee happy.

The eggs weren’t crispy like usual, but were rather steamed to perfection. The meats were varied but generally good. The sausage links were butterflied which cuts down on the gristle; the ham was luncheon meat but the bacon was decent. I liked the fact that we washed it all down with water from gigantic glasses, not the piddly “juice cups” most places give you.

This is admittedly one of the more boring reviews I’ve written in a while. That’s mainly due to the fact that there wasn’t much to harp on! Good food makes bad reviews, and vice versa. The eternal paradox of review writing.

One downside was that the pancakes that came with the big breakfast took an extra half hour to arrive after the eggs. Maybe they expect you to eat them AFTER everything else, but really I was too full to even contemplate eating them once they hit the table. I had to put it in a Charleswood “doggy bag” to take home. I would have liked to sample them at the same time as everything else, but that wasn’t the case. I noticed another table had the same thing: right after they were done their eggs/meat, the pancakes came and they were too full to even start them.

Regardless, there was a lot of good food for a very low price.

This place is a jem.  Just below a ten with a very strong  nine.

Bonus Omelette review

by Chantal Guénette

Mushroom & cheese omelette

(served rolled up, not folded in a half circle)

Bouquet: The mushrooms weren’t canned, and there were lots of them. The omelette was a good size and they brought us hot sauce when we asked for it. It was rooster sauce is not as flavourful as Frank’s Red Hot in my opinion, but it’s still good hot sauce. As long as it clears my sinuses and doesn’t taste horrible, I’m happy.

Boeuf: The cheese was processed. So sad; I was so close to not having any issues with the omelette.

October 18 2008

Charlee’s Restaurant & Lounge

   #5-185 Stadacona

Hours of operation:

Mon -             Closed

Tues - Sun   9 AM  9AM

Breakfast Special  $2.99 (cheap!)

Charlee’s feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere. Over the Higgins bridge from downtown, it faces a field of nothing, surrounded by nothing and it’s in the end of a strip mall which does nothing for me architecturally. Generally, we Breakfast Connoisseurs are wary of strip mall restaurants as they’ve proven to be inadequate.

Not so for Charlee’s. What they lack in location esthetic, they make up in almost every other way possible.

Charlee’s is full of character. The fractured art on the walls and subdued autumnal colours give it a distinct feel. The clientele were mostly moustache-bearing baseball cap-wearing tattooed people in sweatpants and jeans, so we blended right in being from St. James and Charleswood. Ha! 

The menu was hand written on dry erase white boards above the bar, which was partially obscured by clutter. (Menus were provided.)

November 6 2010

Charlee’s Restaurant and Lounge

185 Stadacona Street

???/10 (Read the review and you tell me.)

Breakfast Special - $3.99, served Tues-Fri, 9:00am-11:30am. All-day breakfast $5.49.

It had been two years since we were last at Charlee’s, and though Leif couldn’t join this time, I happily returned to what was one of our top reviews that year. Charlee’s has retained their cheap prices (with slight inflation) and decent food, but the restaurant itself has come apart a bit. There were huge gaps in the ceiling where it looked like a projector had been ripped out (stolen?), and the whole place seemed a bit grungy. In our last review, I noted getting super friendly and happy service, but this time I got surly Sue, the server who doesn’t like you.

Their menu has totally changed, now including interesting omelette options like cordon bleu (turkey, ham, Swiss cheese, honey mustard) and Spanish (chicken, spinach, salsa). Their scramblers also looked good – western, garden veggie, Philly cheese steak and BBQ pulled pork.

I stuck with the breakfast special. The hashbrowns were deep-fried discs but they remained tasty. The bacon was excellent and so was the coffee (a rare thing indeed!). The only thing that was really different was the toast.

The toast… how do I describe it? Seven out of seven people in our breakfast party agreed that it tasted rancid. Since rye bread doesn’t tend to go rancid, we blamed the margarine. My first impression was that it had been spread on using a knife freshly removed from fish guts, but tangier. Simply terrible. We told surly Sue about this, and she took the stack of toast back to the kitchen. She came out some time later with fresh, dry toast and butter packets for us, which we were relieved to find tasted great. However, she mentioned telling the chef what we said, and that he had tasted the margarine and said it was fine.

Hey, we can’t tell you how to run a restaurant, but when seven people tell you that something is rancid, it ought to deserve a more thorough investigation.

The rancid toast fiasco left me with a bad taste in my mouth, literally and figuratively. It made me question why we liked this place so much last time, and it made me question my skills as a reviewer. In short, it was an awful experience. But, because Leif wasn’t there, he and I will return soon and give it another shot. Charlee’s deserves it.