Also notable is that the servers had a hard time understanding me when I spoke to them. I asked if we could order and the server said “okay” and then just left, never to come back. I had to flag her down five minutes later and repeat myself, but even then she didn’t understand right away. The language gap was apparently sizable.

Our coffee was pretty average, but was served in decent-sized mugs. The food was prepared remarkably quick, likely due to the fact that the potatoes were deep-fried hash browns. Not my favourite, by far, but they can be still be tasty if not ideologically annoying. The eggs were interesting… Leif got one over-hard egg and one over-medium. Kind of like a yolky ying-yang. Just another milestone in Leif’s odyssey of improperly prepared eggs: the search for proper over-hard. My eggs were fine, by the way. The vegetable sides are what counteracted the egg-sketch. Everyone’s plate came with a slice of tomato and cucumber, a rarely seen treat. The meats were standard: breakfast links and unexciting bacon. Chantal’s omelette came with unadvertised onions, something she did not appreciate.

The standard sausage links are so predominant in our breakfasts that we’re led to believe there’s one huge factory in Brandon (or wherever) that churns them out and leaves them in parcels on everyone’s doorstop free. Similar to the underground reservoir of sub-par coffee, these links are free for everybody, and more discerning restaurant owners avoid them. Avoiding them always boosts their review score up a few notches.

The Osborne Village Café came to us courtesy of Coors Lite. Apparantly. There was a CL clock, their name on the open sign and a couple other surreptitious CL logos around (including the t-shirt on the sketchy-looking person gathering the dishes [who was recognized as having used to sell newspapers in front of The Bay]). No, we did not order a CL for breakfast, though you couldn’t find a better place to do so.

November 29 2008

Osborne Village Cafe

160 Osborne Street

Hours of operation:

Mon - Sun         6 AM - 7 PM

(Open later if it’s busy)

Breakfast Platter - $5.95

(on chalkboard, includes two meats)

Breakfast – All Day - $5.25

(on menu, one meat)

The Osborne Village Café has changed owners several times since I started going. It started out as the Three Sisters (or was it Five?), then it was just Ozzie’s the first time we reviewed it, now it’s settled into being the café. This incarnation is the best so far but that’s not saying that much.

It still has an Oriental overtone as it had in the past, but the emphasis is more on the western food. It could be said that the emphasis was still on the grime. It could be said, and it was. By me. Right now. It was grimy! We do appreciate a bit of grime, but only up to a point. OVC landed on that point solidly when it was noticed that some of our spoons had already been used to stir coffee. That was sorta sketchy.

Further down the sketchy ladder, we found a dead fruit fly floating in bubbly vinegar. Yep, bubbly like soda water. At least we couldn’t smell the bathrooms downstairs like the last time we were here.