April 17, 2010

Riverside Café

531 St. Mary’s Road

(in the Riverside Inn)

Breakfast Special

$3.29 before tax,

$5.37 w/coffee & tax. $5.25 after 11:00am

The perfect place to crawl to after a night of singing your throat out with karaoke at the Limelight; the bar in the Inn. I say this without having done so, but they serve a greasy good breakfast that’ll fill the hole in your hungover stomach no problem. (Look at the pictures. Andrew was quite hungover that morning. Leif) The Riverside Café has been open for a year after being Lexy Burger. They’ve been serving breakfast for about six months.

The key ingredient to any hangover brek is good strong coffee, which was nice to see there. Too bad they let the carafe run dry and ignored us so long we contemplated stealing the one from the people next to us. We didn’t have to as they eventually did bring us some, but it’s not often I have to wait so long for coffee when it was not busy. North-End (get up and serve yourself) style coffee service or not.

The eggs were very pale, a stark contrast to the omega-3 enriched ones with yolks like tangerines that some places prefer (and mine had dark grill marks on them). In fact, on the omelette a friend got, everything was the same colour on the plate. Toast, hashbrowns, eggs. Fortunately, they had Frank’s hot sauce to add the colour. The bacon was greasy good - another hangover staple - and the potatoes were super soft and buttery. Leif used the term “hyper-palatable,” where food is so buttery, fatty and salty they are insanely easy to eat (you don’t even need teeth to eat with for the most part). The slurge factor was prominent.

One terrifying part of the breakfast were the sausages. They were monochrome mush – really, sausage-flavoured play-dough.

The décor was fairly plain, with frame-store art on the walls and flower-pattern booths (and a ceiling mirror which made me wonder what could go on after close).

The Riverside Café isn’t going to draw me out of my way when in the mood for a good brek, but if I lived a few blocks away, it would be enticing. Especially when karaoke-hungover.