Meal #04 Canada

Our next stop on the culinary journey brought us to Canada, or more accurately, Samsen Soi 2, a few blocks down from Khao San Road. Make no mistake, this is still a pretty touristy area, and the Snack Bar BKK was definitely catering for the tourist palate.

We had a small group today: Jim (USA), Douglas (India), Vivek (Australia), Siri (Thailand), Candida and myself (Singapore).

The main reason the Snack Bar is a stop on the 80 Meals tour is because they have one distinctively Canadian item on the menu: Poutine.

Hand cut fries, covered with brown gravy and cheese cubes. Purists will argue that this isn't really poutine, because it's meant to be cheese curds rather than cheese. Still, they had a Quebec flag on the wall, and there were a couple of French Canadian tourists at the restaurant having some poutine the same time we were there. Presumably they were amused by the fact that they were halfway around the world from home and they were eating "poutine". We ordered three types of poutine to share. The plain classic one above, one with bacon and onion (because bacon and onion automatically make anything taste better), and the Buddhist poutine, by Buddhist I mean it was one with everything and by everything I mean bacon and onion and bolognese.  

So while it may not exactly be poutine, we still polished off three plates before ordering our own mains. Was it delicious? Maybe - or maybe it was just there and our food took a long time to come so we devoured everything as they came.

The rest of the meal was rather mundane: Pad kratiem pork and rice, falafel, a chicken burger, a tuna pita, and a grilled chicken. It was the standard stuff you find at a tourist restaurant, and none particularly outstanding.

I'll have to add that our dining experience was marred by a few hiccups. I arrived an hour early to tell the restaurant to save us a table. When we got there later at the appointed time, there was no table - and we ended up waiting an additional half hour before being seated. And then it was a wait to order our food, and then for the food to arrive. Service was slow, because they obviously didn't have enough staff to deal with the crowd, and it wasn't even a big crowd - 20 people all in. That and the meh food means that this is probably a place to miss.

Despite the hiccups everyone had a fun time - so kudos to the gang for keeping our spirits up. In the end we each paid about THB300 for the bill, and we hung around for coffee at another place nearby.

We collected B80 for the rat fund, bringing our current pot to B840.