Restaurants
Cutlet House
All week I'd been working myself up for Korean, which brought me to Cutlet House, a new restaurant in the remains of what was once I-Noodle. Cutlet House specializes in Korean cutlets, serving them in pork, beef, chicken and fish versions.
These thin breaded cutlets, known in Korea as Donkasseu, are the Korean version of Tonkatsu, which is the Japanese version of schnitzel. Lost in translation? Me too. Unfortunately, the best way I can describe Cutlet House's Donkasseu is with a quintessentially Canadian word: meh.
Served with suspicious speed, my pork was dark-edged and chewy enough to taste like it'd been waiting for me for quite a while. Smothered in an overripe fruit sauce and plated with rice, potato and fresh green salad, the Donkasseu left me underwhelmed.
In fact, the most interesting thing I have to say about the whole experience is that writing about it just taught me that underwhelmed is actually a word. For the last 16 years I've assumed Sloan's lexicography was right, believing that people only used it as breezy reference to their 1992 hit, Underwhelmed:
She was underwhelmed if that's a word,
I know it's not 'cause I looked it up.
I will say this though - Cutlet House is the kind of place I really want to like. My server was so friendly I feel guilty I didn't like the food. So I'll throw this one out: the salad was excellent. And, they have a pretty good selection of Korean-style Chinese food and a nice, clean dining room.
If I had ordered this dish in a hurry, I'd be pleased with the quick service, and rapid delivery of my massive slab of pork. That said, next time I'm in this hood and looking for lunch, I'm going to check out another place - like The Grill Pit, which is just a stone's throw away. Oh, and after that, I'm going to head over to one of these places, and maybe see about a new dictionary, too.
Discussion
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To be honest, I'm a bit sick of all the glowing reviews by BlogTO writers. There's usually two reasons for this: (1) the writer has a financial stake in the restaurant being reviewed; and/or (2) the writer knows next to nothing about the cuisine (and so can't distinguish between good and bad food).
Thank you Devon Scoble! BlogTO needs more writers like you!
BTW, as far as I know, a specific type of cuisine's goodness/badness isn't *always* defined by how closely it adheres to culinary canon (that would be "authentic"). If it's tasty, it's "good."
As someone who used to write food reviews for BlogTO, I'll hop in to talk about my personal policy on that matter: I ate at some very crappy restaurants while I was reviewing, and I consistently chose not to review those places because I didn't want to help sink the businesses. I was happy to write positive reviews to send customers and dollars to restaurants I liked, But there was no way I was putting some family's livelihood at stake for the sake of being able to write a slammy blog post about how shitty their food was. So I kept my mouth shut about the places I hated, assuming that if they were always that bad, they'd eventually fold without me anyway (which, I observe, has indeed happened for several of the ickier places I kept silent about in the last year or so).
Therefore, <a href-"http://www.blogto.com/author/nicolestamp";>all the food I reviewed got more or less positive reviews</a>- not because I loved everything I ate, but because I didn't write about anything I hated.
(BTW, I should add that this was not suggested to me by any BlogTO editorial staff at all- in fact I was encouraged to write stuff with an opinion. It was 100% my own decision to only select the positive opinions for expansion on the bloog.)
Or better yet why not make a constructively critical review like this one, so that they owners/chefs/managers could have a chance to improve and perhaps not crumble, putting some family's livelihood at stake?
On another note, I wish this review would have given prices for what was ordered. That picture doesn't make it look very big, and I'm used to massive cutlets for minuscule prices here in 韩國.
pork cutlets : koreans = shepherds pie : canadians
There's a limit to how "good" cutlets can be, just as there's a limit to how "good" shepherds pie can really be. They're usually served at "boon-shik" (or the Korean style fast food places that dot the Bloor strip), and are meant to be cheap and fast... taste usually isn't a factor. If you've had one "돈까스", you've had'em all.