The Grove

Tubby's, at the corner of Grosvenor and Stafford, was a restaurant I've heard referred to as a "Winnipeg Institution", and I have to assume that was by virtue of the quality of its food in its heyday, or just that's it's been around FOREVER. (Which, at the risk of getting bottles full of pee hurled at me, seems to be the case for every single "Winnipeg Institution". (I don't want to get into running down the list, so I'll just leave it at this: Salsbury House? Puh-leeze.(*))) But now we have the Grove in Tubby's old location, offering a take on English pub food and branded with an upscale-ish feel.

My interest was piqued as renovations were begun on the old Tubby's space. I pass down Stafford almost daily, and as construction was underway the windows were blanked with butcher paper on which were hand-painted black silhouettes of a table full of revelers: elegant.

The former Tubby's space has been completely opened up to a single large room with the bar in the centre, flanked by the dining room on one side, and the pub on the other. The only real difference between these two seems to be the presence of television screens(**) on the pub side. The dining room was full, so we were seated on the pub side.

The space is spare, a fact acknowledged by the owner in an interview on the Free Press website. Hopefully the "few more pictures" he throws up are a bit less depressing than the black and white photos of dreary English graveyards that decorated the wall next to the table I was seated at. Despite that, though, the space is airy and fairly modern, if not really exceptional in any regard.

A word on the physical layout of the room: as designed, the bar is way too big for the space. WAY too big. It juts out so far into the room that it leaves a stingy, approximately three foot space between the centre chair seated at the bar and the end wall of the room, a space that must be navigated by every server going from kitchen to bar patrons (and back), as well as by patrons on their way to the washroom. In the hour I was in the restaurant I witnessed two near-collisions between patrons and food/beverage-laden waitresses, not to mention countless traffic jams. A veritable nightmare, and a problem it seems incredible no one foresaw.

The menu is fairly short, and mostly (we'll get to that later) focused on simple, traditional English pub grub. (Bangers and mash, natch. Which I've never actually ordered in my life. Doing so seems vaguely embarrassing, for some reason, like it's tourist-y.) The Constant Dinner Companion and I both ordered burgers. I'm always on the lookout for a burger that will live up to my (admittedly almost impossibly high) standards, and the waitress assured us that everything in the kitchen was freshly made. Yes, every time I order a hamburger, I ask the waitress if it's a frozen or fresh patty. I like burgers. They're one of my favourite things. Unfortunately, ordering a hamburger is probably the quickest and easiest route to soul-crushing disappointment available to me in a restaurant.

And hey, guess what? The burger at the Grove was a disappointment. The patty had a reasonably nice char on it, but it was woefully under-seasoned and mostly tasteless. The dominant flavour and smell of the burger was the herbs in the bun, and that's a problem. And speaking of the bun, it was massive, much too big for the patty within, leading to the Grove burger committing the cardinal sin of having its last bites be meatless bites of bun alone. This is a problem I encounter constantly in restaurants, and I just don't get it. Seriously, this is ironclad burger law: the total area of the burger > the total area of the bun.

Oh, and I ordered it with fries. They were okay. And moving on.

While perusing the menu, my dinner companion and I (of course) considered trying the pork belly appetizer. Pork belly = yum, plus we generally feel obliged to order the weirdest thing on the menu wherever we are. It was served with a sweet potato puree and something called "tare sauce". (Quick google at the table = thickened, sweetened soy sauce; okay.) We were both reasonably hungry, but a burger and fries can be a lot of food, so we deferred. After we had each eaten our burgers, we were still feeling peckish, so we ordered the pork belly appetizer for dessert. I really enjoy doing things like this in restaurants, just to see if our weird demands faze the staff.(***) They didn't, and our dessertizer (tm) was out promptly(****). Firstly, it was extremely pretty: served on an undulating, rimless plate, the strips of pork belly were arranged in an angle across, the puree next to the pork belly. Along an edge of the plate a row of various pickled julienned vegetable garnishes (radishes, scallions, beets), and scattered throughout, a few drops of the tare sauce and (I think) a parsley oil. Yes, pretty, but we were left a bit unsure of how to eat it. The dish definitely had an Asian feel, where the pickled garnishes are usually used as palate cleansers. The sweet potato puree was unseasoned, so we figured we should scoop some onto the belly bits, but once we tried incorporating everything on the plate into a single bite, we realized this was how we should be eating it. Unfortunately, we were halfway through by that point. I really fail to see how just putting everything together would have made the dish any less pretty: pork belly, puree on top, garnishes on top of the puree. And it would have been a hell of a lot easier to eat. The pork belly was cooked reasonably well, but not amazingly well, the sear not quite as crusty as I like. And there was so little of the tare sauce, it was pretty much impossible to get some on every bite. All in all, when you managed to assemble a bite with every component it was quite tasty, but the difficulty in doing so frustrated me.

What struck me most about the belly dish, though, was how inconsonant it was from the rest of the menu. Hell, it stuck out like a sore thumb. Fish and chips, welsh rarebit, bangers and mash, and...an Asian-inspired pork belly appetizer? Compared to the burgers we ate, everything about the pork belly made it seem like it came from another restaurant: the flavour profile, the presentation, its psuedo-avant garde-ness, even the plate it was served on. If I had ordered the pork belly as an actual appetizer, when it was finished I would have been thinking, "ooh, that was interesting! I wonder what kind of spin they're going to put on my burger!" And when I received a regular ol' burger and fries, I would have been disappointed. Well, more disappointed. (Heh.) I can understand a chef wanting to stretch out creatively, but it still must be kept in the general context of the restaurant it's being served in. Um, duh.

I guess it sounds like I'm shitting all over the Grove (and I didn't even mention how much I disliked their massive leather-bound menus!). I guess I am. Really, it's much, much better than your standard chain garbage--I'd take it over Tavern United bullshit any day of the week. And it's actually really, really cheap: $40 covered our entire meal, including tip. It just frustrates me when a restaurant seems to have so many of the elements required in place, but the results still miss the mark.

p.s. The prices in the menu include all taxes! This rules. Makes for a nice, even bill at the end. There, I feel much better going out on a positive note.


Location: 164 Stafford St.

Price tag: The burger was $9 with fries, same deal for the appetizer. Some entrees run a bit higher, but everything is under $20. As I said, for us the total bill with tip = $40.

Website: www.the-grove.ca/


*While I'm at it, a word on fatboys. For the longest time, I took a silly, mealy-mouthed stand toward the fatboy: "Oh, they're okay, for what they are, I guess. I just prefer a different kind of burger." Those days are in the past. Fuck fatboys. Seriously. Fatboys suck. A flat, frozen patty the thickness of cardboard, and some greasy disgusting chili that no one in their right mind would touch if served to them in a bowl. And don't get me started on putting mayo on a burger. That this has become the dominant form of the mighty hamburger in this city boggles the mind.

**This is turning into an extra-rant-y entry, but god, I fucking hate televisions in restaurants. I suppose that on the pub side they are required for sports bullshit, but every time I'm in a restaurant and there's a tv in my line of sight, it is a constant irritant. My eye just gets drawn to it, nothing I can do about it, and I spend much of my time fighting not to watch whatever useless bullshit I don't care about that is blaring at me.

***I recall dining with the Constant Dinner Companion at Promenade Bistro and when we asked to share the quiche entree as an appetizer (hey, we both really like quiche, okay?) the waiter's brains melted, and oozed out his ears. Well, not really, but we had to explain what we wanted at least three times, and he was essentially incredulous.

****The CDC remarked that he's going to make a habit of ordering dessertizers, since he's occasionally still hungry, but rarely feels like dessert. You go, girl!