Truffles!

One Saturday evening last fall, Patrick and I couldn't decide what to eat. So what did we do? We decided to Saskaspoon!

So we shook the ipod, and voila...we got Truffles!

Patrick had never been to Truffles before. I had, a couple of times. Twice for lunch with some friends, and once my friend Lise took me out for supper as a special treat. It's a nice place, but pretty pricey, pretty elitish. You kind of have to be in the right mindset if you're going there for a Saturday evening meal. Tim Horton's on a Saturday night this was not!

Truffles is one of Saskatoon's two "French Bistros". It is a rather fancy place, in that they serve local foods, have an extensive wine list, and a food menu that changes regularly. They have cloth napkins, real flowers, and you can be pretty sure that your fork won't have food stuck in the tines.

The other thing I was sure Truffles would have? A pretty packed house on a Saturday night at 8pm. We knew we had the Saskaspooning rule that you had to go to a place if it was open, but what if it was open and you couldn't get in? All we could do was try. I picked up the phone and called.

"Hi. So I know it's kind of last minute," I said, "but how likely is it that we can get in for supper tonight?"

"Tonight?" asked the Truffles Hostess (see? that's class. it wasn't just a harried waitress or sullen adolescent answering -- this was a girl whose sole job was to play Gatekeeper). "Tonight's full up. Unless you can get here in the next 15 minutes."

I looked at Patrick, in his jeans, sneakers, and black tshirt, and down at my own jeans and grey sweater. No makeup, hair barely brushed. 15 minutes? "We'll be there!" I told her.

"We've got to go now," I told Patrick. I grabbed my skull-and-crossbones purse and off we went to spend way more money than either one of us intended.

We were making good time, and I was looking forward to our meal. But then...we couldn't find any where to park. It had been 15 minutes and we were going around and around the block, frantically looking. "We'll miss our reservation!" We were anxious, but I actually think we were more concerned about what that would mean about our Saskaspooning adventure -- would we get to reshake? Of would we have to wait until tomorrow and we could get in to Truffles for lunch before we could eat again? It was all so unknown.

But then we found a spot! And towards the restaurant we hurried. "Hi! I'm Jenny. I'm here for my reservation," I told the Hostess, and as she led us towards the table we looked around the lovely, elegant restaurant, where expensively dressed couples and local business people out entertaining visiting business people sat at the cozy, white-table-clothed tables and ate tiny, fancy foods.

"Did you park in the back?" She asked us, showing us a table, and taking our coats!

"Park in the back? No...." Patrick shook his head, and she explained that they have a private parking lot for their customers. Amazing! (This rarely happens in our town, so please forgive my enthusiasm).

"We're a bit under-dressed," Patrick made a bit of a face and we both looked discreetly at the young couple at the table next to us -- it appeared they were celebrating an anniversary or something. Both were dressed in expensive black items, and she had a big black flower on her head. They were young and she had a lot of diamonds. "First anniversary?" Patrick wondered. "Perhaps he has just proposed," I mused, and then we began a fun game -- figuring out what special occasion had brought our fellow diners out for supper. Because we were pretty sure that they all had legitimate reasons for being there, unlike us (unless you count shaking your Ipod a legitimate reason). Our favourite couple? They came in about half-way through our meal and sat at a table behind us. They were about 45, both were quite tall, and both were wearing complete sets of motorcycle leathers. Suddenly our jeans and tshirts no longer seemed so casual.

We decide to have fun with our experience. We ordered pre-meal cocktails, and we knew immediately that we had the world's nicest waiter: I liked the sound of "Planter's Punch" but told my waiter that it sounded too much like "Planters Warts." So he said, "Why don't you pretend you're ordering a Sea Breeze, but I'll make it taste like the Cocktail Which Shan't be Named?"

They brought us a pre-meal snack (another sign you're eating in a Fancy Place) of crunchy breads and garlicky olive tapenade. It was great.

The drinks came and we got sillier. We started to pretend it was our first date, because this seemed like the kind of restaurant you might take a person you'd liked forever, and had finally gotten up the nerve to ask out, and you were now trying to impress. Or perhaps if you'd been sleeping together for months and finally realized you wanted to legitimize it because you had been slowly falling in love. And falling in love as a result of a sordid tryst deserved a super-fancy first date to whitewash the past.

(NB: We didn't specify what kind of first date we were on. This wasn't any sort of role play, people. This was just a good time).

We both ordered a salad to start, and, in truly Fancy Style, our $11 salads were very, very small. Very, very delicious, but also tiny. Our meals arrived next: Patrick had duck and I ate the steak and potatoes. It was delicious, but we had eaten so much of the crusty bread and tapenade that we were too full to order desert. We went over the list of deserts, picked which ones we would eat if we had any room left in our digestive tracts, and promised to come back for desert another day (perhaps on a pretend second date!)

One of the nicest things about Truffles is that most of the ingredients used were local, which was comforting in that we were doing our part to help out the Saskatchewan economy (and when we got the bill, it was evident that we'd helped out the local economy quite a lot....)

Final verdict? Truffles is highly recommended! Even if you're wearing jeans. Or leather pants!

PS Not only were we pretending this was our first date, we decided that we would actually make this count as our 3rd anniversary date (which was about a week away). So take your pick--was this a first date meal or a 3rd anniversary meal? Does it matter when you're tipsy and eating well and enjoying your friend?

Schryer's Smoked BBQ Shack

Last fall, Patrick and I invited Jay and Rylan along on a Saskaspooning adventure. We went to Schryer's Smoked BBQ shack, a relatively new (2008) restaurant in the "industrial" part of town.

I haven't written about it, but, to be honest, it wasn't particularly interesting.

But I have to write about it, because we went due to the Urbanspoon.

So....what to say? I think we'd all been there before, so there was nothing new or unexpected about it. It's a fast-food type place, with a counter to order at and then you take trays to your tables. The fun part? They are licensed, so you can have a beer in a plastic cup, which makes you feel a bit like you've stumbled upon a Burger King at a music festival. So that's kind of funweird. And the food is good--they smoke the meat out back in a giant smoker in the parking lot, which is cool, and they smoke their cheese out there, too. So that's nifty. And you don't think you'd ever see that in a "big city" -- it feels slightly sketch, like someone at city hall gave them the permit because he/she grew up in Kindersley or Unity where a smoker outside in the parking lot made total sense.

So we all ate sandwiches, and had coleslaw, and smoked cheese-macaroni salad, and corn bread, and beer, and I bragged about a presentation I'd done the day before at the library about how video games are good for kids, and then the beer kicked in and I worried that I was dominating the conversation, and after all Jay and Rylan are mostly Patrick's friends, not mine, and I was behaving like a lame person and Patrick would judge me through their eyes, because why wouldn't he, I was totally just talking too much and I should shut up, put a smoked meat sandwich in my mouth and let them talk for a bit, just chew and chew and chew and keep quiet for once, I mean I was irritating myself, even, by now, and maybe they'd forget I'd been so annoying and .... "Man, this sandwich is good".

the end.

The Yard and Flagon on a Monday Night

on monday, June 29th I had a big night ahead of me. at 1am (so i guess that would make it tuesday?) i was scheduled to perform for a group of highschool graduates at their "After Grad" party, where presumably all the lame/square kids who couldn't get access to alcohol were going to be while their hipper counterparts were at bush parties, drinking too much and fearing the future while talking about how much they were going to "love" the "rest of their lives". "it's going to be so much better than the past four years!" they'd say. ah, youth. so much better, and yet also so much worse.

before i was due at the seniors' centre (this fact is perhaps the best fact about the After Grad -- it was held at a seniors' centre -- the kids were being fast tracked through adulthood) patrick and i decided to saskaspoon for a very, very late supper. we shook the ipod and got a bunch of restaurants that were not open that late at night. we shook until we got the Yard and Flagon, a hipster/student bar we were all too familiar with.

oh, urbanspoon, we KNOW we were limiting you with our need to go to a restaurant serving food at midnight. but there are a number of sketchy dive bars out there we've never been to. why send us to one we are sick of?

sigh. we went anyway, because "thems the rules", as i'm sure someone, somewhere, says.

we walked in to find the music very loud, and the tables very full. we got a tiny table for two in a corner. as we sat down, patrick said, "look it's that-young-person-you-supervise". sure enough, That Young Person was sitting with his friends at a table just behind us.

i see That Young Person around sometimes. At parties, or concerts, or, like that night, in bars. I always feel guilty when i see him. once we were both at a party and i went outside to share a cigarette with someone (don't worry, mum, i don't make a habit of it) and That Young Person was also outside smoking. We were both awkward because no one wants to smoke in front of their boss, and no one wants to smoke in front of their lackey. It doesn't really help anyone out.

so i always feel bad when i turn up in places where he is. i never know if i am supposed to walk over and talk to him, or ignore him, like a parent who's at the same movie as her teenaged son. i chose to ignore him. i had enough to worry about. the show, for one (if i was having this much trouble figuring out how to handle seeing That Young Person in the Yard and Flagon, how would i ever make jokes those new grads could relate to? (in the end it turns out i couldn't. a joke about the unibomber, for instance, which would have killed if the seniors' centre had been filled with actual seniors, got no reaction beyond, "how old are you, anyway?"), i also had to decide what to eat.

luckily on Mondays they have a "beer and burger" deal for only 6$, so that is what i went with. only i had a diet coke with my burger. patrick had a reuben sandwich with salad.

all in all, "the yard" as we locals call it, has fine food. it's better than most pub food (with a menu that includes elk and good veggie burgers, fresh veggies, good salads, and delicious fries), not as good as other pub food. it's doable it's a good place to go if you can't think of anywhere else to go, or you are due to act at the seniors centre down the street (convenient!)

i just now asked patrick if he had anything to add about his experience at the yard and flagon. he shrugged and said, "i wasn't particularly hungry". you can interpret that statement as you wish. i will add this: when you eat at a pub or end up at a party or concert with That Young Person You Supervise, you should acknowledge them right away. because as i was eating my pretty-good burger, my Young Person came up behind me, patted me on the shoulder, and said, "Hi, Jenny", in a voice that conveyed his understanding that i was deliberately ignoring him, and he thought it was hilarious, and totally unnecessary. after all, i'm his supervisor at the public library of all places, not his mother.

i almost wish i could have joined him outside for a collegial cigarette, but i had a show to do.

new island suhi (the old one)

patrick and i got back from a three-week vacation in vietnam, japan, and vancouver. we ate lots of food on our trip, some of it delicious and some of it terrible. while in japan and vancouver we ate sushi. it was great. (some of it is featured above; this sushi was served by a ninja at a ninja-themed restaurant). the best sushi was, in fact, in the airport in tokyo. tuna so red and wasabi so green and pacific makeral with this crazygood texture.

ummmum! how we loved the sushi.

flash forward to April 19th, about a month after our amazing airport meal. we hadn't saskaspooned in a long time, so we were pretty excited. however, like most things, our next adventure was not going to be easy.

patrick's ipod with the urbanspoon application was in his truck. "let's just use the website," i suggested, but we both felt as though that would go against tradition. We enjoy shaking the ipod to get the restaurant -- and you can't shake the website. it just wouldn't seem right to click a button instead of shake the ipod. so we went out to the truck, got the ipod, and tried to connect to the internet but my wireless doesn't seem to extend past the boundaries of my lawn. (sorry neighbours. no stealing from me, i'm afraid). rather than go back into the house, patrick drove us to the parking lot of my library, where the wireless does extend past the walls. (the library is very committed to freedom of information, it seems).

so we shook the ipod and got.....New Island Sushi. "Which one?" asked, knowing that there was a New Island Sushi recently opened up downtown that I had always wanted to try.

"it's the old one, up near circle drive," he said, and we felt a bit sad -- no one wants to eat sushi n a restaurant stuck between a Brick and a cowboy boot wholesaler's. but saskaspooning had spoken, and we had to obey.

so we drove up to the restaurant, on the corner of Quebec and the freeway, and headed inside. turns out it was All You Can Eat sushi for 13.99$ a piece for lunch, with the caveat that you have to pay for all the sushi you don't consume. when we sat down there was no one else in there besides a table with an odd assortment of sort-of-goth, sort-of-emo teens with uncombed hair, bad skin, and a middle-aged man i took to be a father.

"birthday party?" wondered patrick, explaining the presence of the older gentleman as a kindly father paying for his kid's friends to eat sushi after a late night sleepover party, but i worried he was some sort of pied piper to the disenfranchised who weren't attractive enough to be emo or angry enough to be goth.

the waitress (not a ninja this time, just a regular teenager new to the english language) gave us a plasticized menu with a grease pencil; we were to write in the quantity of each item we wanted. after we ate the menu would be wiped clean, ready for the next glutton to write down 6 dragon rolls and 5 orders of gyoza, or whatever.

we ordered too much food, of course. and unfortunately none of it was very good. the miso soup was okay, but it came with plastic spoons, which felt depressing, as was the fact that patrick's bowl was cracked and leaking, meaning he either had to eat the soup very fast, or let it leak all over a pile of napkins.

the sushi wasn't so hot, either. the rice tasted kind of stale, or something, and there was far too much mayonnaise on the rolls. (why mayonnaise is on sushi at all has always caused me pause). we were sort of disheartened by the whole meal, which of course paled in comparison to the sushi in japan and vancouver. perhaps if we had travelled to spain and toledo, we would have thought this was great, but we'd been to sushiland, and we knew what we were missing.

needless to say, we didn't finish our meal. we had to pay extra for the leftovers, of which we had too much. at first i thought the waitress was going to charge us 30$ for the extra pieces--when she said that i was about to cram the sushi into my mouth, mayonaisey mango and all. but then i realized she only said, "Three", not "thirty", and i felt okay about leaving the leftovers behind.

that vietnamese place no one can name.

so there are a couple of summer saskaspooning adventures i still have to write about (otawa and schryer's) but before i get to those i'll write about yesterday's trip to thien vietnam.

patrick turned up after a five hour drive down from pierceland yesterday, december 31st 2009. we decided to celebrate the ending of the decade with a final saskaspooning trip.

we gave the little ipod a shake and voila! we got thien vietnam , at 123 3rd Ave S.

"is that that place next to the red pepper?" i asked. "the place people go to when everything else is closed?"

"i think so," said patrick, resigned.

neither one of us was particularly happy about going to thien vietnam, mostly because it's saskatoon's fall-back restaurant where the food isn't particularly nice and the decor is rather depressing. there are lots of piles of newspapers everywhere and various members of the thien vietnam family sitting around reading them and eating delicious-looking things that are not on the menu and you can't have. actually, that sounds a bit like visiting someone's house. someone who isn't really your friend.

anyway. so patrick and i turned up and we found ourselves a booth. we got menus and we both decided that we didnt want to get vermicelli bowls, because frankly the vermicelli bowls there aren't that great. we decided to get other things on the menu so we could see if thien vietnam might just be the kind of place you'd pick first.

so i ordered a tofu-vegetable something-or-other and patrick ordered something with rice and peanut sauce. while we waited for the food to arrive we visited with a small boy who was playing with a stack of take out coffee cup lids. (one day he will be an adult and write a one-man show or a wryly humorous memoir about growing up vietnamese in the prairies, where his toys were styrofoam boxes and plastic lids, his chief playmate was his vietnamese gramma--also our waitress--and he took naps under the tables--he did that, too).

at this point we were very very hungry. the little boy wasn't entertaining us anymore (he was napping) and we needed some food. but the waitress/gramma returned to let us know, with her burgeoning english skills and some sign language, that in fact we couldn't have the food we ordered as the cook who knows how to make those dishes was at the bank and wouldn't be back for about 30 minutes.

we knew we couldnt go anywhere else--saskaspooning trumps all, afterall. "so what can we eat?" patrick asked. it turned out that all we could order were vermicelli noodle bowls.

so we each ordered one of those. they arrived. they were lackluster. and thien vietnam remains a last-resort restaurant.