Nickel’s

Another restaurant dinner, much to my chagrin. Shannon bought me tickets to The Dears, one of my favorite bands and undoubtably the best live performers I know, for my birthday last week. The concert was tonight, so after work we both got cleaned up and tried to find a restaurant we could afford that offered a menu item I haven't already eaten. It amazes me how unbelievably difficult this is! Surprisingly, we settled on a 50's themed diner called Nickels, after seeing several locations on a single street we assumed they must have at least somewhat decent food in order to stay in business and went in to take disgustingly cute pictures of ourselves drinking a malt with two straws.

I've grown a little wary of any restaurant that says something along the lines of "Tourists welcome!" on their door, because it gives the aire of, "We don't care if you come back!" to anyone actually from here. This couldn't have been more correct with this place. It took a fairly minimal amount of time to be seated, but actually getting our order taken too far longer. I ended up ordering the clubhouse sandwich; actually, a smoked meat clubhouse sandwich, and Shannon had a burger. The malt we desired was not on the menu, so we had a chocolate milkshake instead, which was basically that quik bunny syrup mixed into what I'll assume was someone else's vanilla shake.

I assume this because that's what the assembly of the rest of our food tasted like. When the food arrived, surprisingly quickly considering our service and the amount of people in the restaurant, the fries were colder than my skin, soggy and dripping with grease. It was as though they had pre-fried them once and were waiting to fry them again to serve, but hadn't actually done so. The toast in my clubhouse was more like slightly toasted bread that had been taken from other sandwiches kicking around the dish pit; incredibly soggy and unmanagable. The smoked meat was not Montreal smoked meat (why would you sell anything else in Montreal?) but this sort of slimy corned beef concoction that might have resembled pastrami if it had any flavor other than salt.

Shannon ordered a pickle as a side to her burger. For the unbelievable price of two dollars plus tax she received a pickle sliced into four that was perhaps inferior to any pickle ever created. It was comparable to a week old cucumber soaked in a solution I use to clean my windows; just vinegar and water. The coleslaw was the only thing plated that was not horrible, but it was far from memorable. I went to the washroom and a little kid had been waiting to jump out and scare the next person to enter. It's a good thing I didn't have to go too badly or I would have just then. He ran off laughing as I went about my business.