The Red Pepper!

Hey gang!

So I'm getting a bit suspicious about the Urbanspoon. Because, although we use the random feature, we keep getting restaurants downtown. This doesn't seem very randomized. I mean, we keep getting sent to restaurants we already know about. Restaurants we have already eaten at, often many times. I suspect what's happening is that the random button picks up the most popular restaurants in the Urbanspoon database, the ones that get the most views.

I'm not complaining, and this doesn't mean we're going to stop. And it doesn't mean we aren't having adventures. It just means that we're having our adventures at places we've already been.

So where have we been recently? Well....The Red Pepper!

Have you heard of this place? You probably have. It's right next to that vietnamese place no one can name on 3rd Ave. They recently got a fancy new facade -- it looks like fake rocks have been glued to the front of the building. We were hopeful that they had done up the inside, too, making it like a new restaurant to us, and thus justifying the saskaspooning, but, alas, it would seem their bank loan was only for enough to do up the outside. The inside was the same -- old wooden booths, plastic-coated seats, and overworked wait staff.

The Red Pepper does a variety of Asian dishes. Mostly Vietnamese noodle bowls, cold rolls, deep fried rolls, curry dishes and stir fries of a pan-Asian variety.

We decided to get dishes we'd never had before. We ordered "deep fried shrimp rolls" which turned out to be big shrimps skewered straight, wrapped in rice paper, and then soaked in boiling oil.

SOOO bad for your heart. SOOO good for your soul.

Here is a photo of our food. Can you tell what these dishes are?

And I don't actually remember what else we ate

I'll tell you why I wasn't thinking about food: we were trying to solve a MYSTERY. It goes like this:

While we were eating, we realized that there was a large group of young men sitting at a couple of tables near the back. And they looked tough. Like, punk/metal tough. Like the kinds of guys who'd travel around in a van together, making noisy, sweaty punk music in small town bars and sleeping in ditches. But the thing is....there were like twenty of them. All tatooes and black hoodies with silkscreened anarchy patches. They looked like the people I hung out with in highschool, actually. They also were the types of people that we should recognize. Between the two of us, Patrick and I have at least a passing knowledge of pretty much everyone who looks like "Someone" in this town between 25 and 40, at least by face. (I'm not bragging. It's a pretty small "scene", you know? Also, we're pretty people-about-town ourselves.)

This is them waiting to pay. Do you recognize them?

"Could this be some sort of giant band? Is there a festival?" One of them was wearing a lanyard or something, and we wondered, "is there a show that these guys are all performing at?" I even got the local arts paper to see if there was anything in there, but it gave up no clues.

At one point I suggested going over and asking if they were in a band, or a bunch of bands, but Patrick pointed out that you can't just walk up to every random group of ruffians and ask them if they have a show later. 

Eventually, this giant group of guys got up en mass, waited patiently in line to pay, and then left.  I kind of wanted to trail them, but we were eating ..... something...?

It is unlikely I will ever remember what we ate that night. Our meal has been eclipsed by shrimp rolls and mysterious rockandrollers....

O'Shea's: Saskaspooning isn't always a mind-blowing experience

So recently my friend Mark came to visit. Mark is a nice guy. Fun, polite, patient, funny, impeccably dressed. And accommodating to the nth degree (is that an expression? It sounds like one...)

>>Note: that is not a photo of my evening. But doesn't that guy in the hat look like he's having the best time? >>

Mark came to visit for my birthday weekend. We decided to take him Saskaspooning. He was excited. What might we possibly get? What seedy bar or creepy back alley sandwich stand might we come across? What fancy high class joint might we end up at?

We sat on the edge of our seats in anticipation. This was me and Patrick showing my Big City Friend a good time in good ole Saskatoon!! And we shook the ipod....and got...

"O'Shea's???"

"What's O'Shea's?" Mark asked, all innocent.

O'Shea's is one of Saskatoon's great equalizers. It's an "Irish" pub downtown with a mix of students, after-work professionals (and sort-of professionals), and artsy hipsters. Now, don't get the wrong idea, folks. We don't have a lot of places to drink downtown, so people just kind of flock to the three or so bars -- it's not like O'Shea's is particularly awesome, or anything. It's an equalizer because we have very little else here.

So Mark was happy enough but Patrick and I were like, "Man, we were just there like three days ago." (Seriously. We were getting a drink before a movie). The one positive is that a few years ago I wrote a novel (it remains unpublished) that Mark had read, and the characters spend a lot of time in a bar called Backdraft (isn't that a good bar name??) which is based on O'Shea's. So Mark was pleased about getting to see that bar.

(Again, Mark is very polite. So we had no idea if he was really pleased, or not. Those manners make him inscrutable).

Anyway, off we went to O'Shea's. We sat at a tall table near the bar, between a couple of beefy guys in ball caps and an older, rather stringy couple in leather jackets and sun-and-cigarette-lined faces. We all ordered beers, and I got a hamburger and a side of Champ, an O'Shea's delicacy of mashed potatoes, onions, and spices. Patrick got a half-order of fish and chips and Mark, bless his healthful ways, ordered a grilled chicken wrap with a side of salad.

The food arrived. The hamburger was big, tasty, and the Champ was as delicious as mashed potatoes in a bar can be. (In fact, Andrea, a character in my yet-to-be-published novel always orders mashed potatoes at Backdraft, so I kind of have to always get them at O'Shea's in an homage to her). The fish and chips were, well, fish and chips, and the wrap was.....drippy.

"What's happening to your food?" asked Patrick as Mark lifted his sandwich up to his mouth and a long, pale pink stream dribbled out of the wrap and onto the plate.

"I guess my sandwich is moist," said Mark, cheerfully, and took a bite. "It's very tasty," he said, and dabbed at the sandwich with a napkin. Oh, that Mark. Polite to the end.