The Counter offers classic diner fare including Caesar salad (in foreground) and excellent poutine (in rear).
There's a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milkshake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.
- David Lynch
A young couple in co-ordinated outfits opens a set of tall art-deco steel doors and enters a small glass vestibule. Doors on the left and right lead into dining rooms filled with sleek booths. In front of them is a paned glass wall looking onto a cabinet of wonders filled with porcelain figurines. A server in a blue gingham shirt smiles and eyes the couple expectantly from the other side. The glass wall prevents her from speaking with them. The visitors peruse a menu displayed on a tall stand and mill mutely around their fishbowl for another minute, look perplexed and eventually leave the way they came in.
I know how they feel. There is something deeply confusing about The Counter, the inscrutable 24-hour diner in the chic new Thompson Hotel. It's clearly an homage to the Rat Pack era, with booths, marble and velvet accents and a colourful Cuban tile floor. Or maybe it's a tribute to pre-revolutionary France, with its wooden barrel-vaulted ceiling and organic-shaped glass lamps. Or perhaps it's an update on the classic diner, yellow and red plastic condiment dispensers at every table. In fact, it's a random assemblage of all of the above.
For all of the design idiosyncrasies, the menu is highly conventional. The sizable breakfast carte features a dozen egg dishes, various fruits and cereals and a batch of griddle breads, pancakes, waffles, crepes and the like. The all-day and all-night menu, with its hot dogs, hamburgers, sandwiches and chips, is in every way your typical diner menu.
Breakfast is a nice time to visit, with the sun streaming in and bleary-eyed travellers occupying booths and catching up on the news while nursing cups of good strong coffee. The music segues artfully from Jean Knight and Bob Dylan to Amy Winehouse and the Smiths. It is a bit disconcerting, though, to navigate the awkward fishbowl entrance and find no one there to greet you. The first time this happened I simply took a seat, but had to wait a while for anyone to spot me and realize I needed a menu.
When the food does arrive, it goes some way to making up for the harried nature of the service. A stack of blueberry pancakes (the sweetness of the batter puts the emphasis firmly on the cakes) come strictly unadorned except for a few scattered blueberries. The cakes are light and flavourful and could be improved if the kitchen would simply warm up the syrup that comes on the side in a tiny steel pitcher.
A simple omelette of ham with three cheeses is so well formed it looks as though it were cooked in a mould. The eggs are light, the cheese gooey and the ham pulls everything together. It is a respectable omelette, if a bit prosaic. The better-than-average home fries alongside it are crisp, well seasoned on the outside and almost fluffy within.
The kitchen's biggest problem isn't that it messes things up a lot, just that - while clean and reasonably fresh-tasting - the food seems generic, like it's all shipped in from some high-end diner factory in rural New Jersey and assembled by machines. In fact, the only time you get a sense that there are flesh-and-blood people working in the kitchen (when you aren't hearing them yell jokes at one another) is when something goes wrong. I'm thinking specifically of the shmaltz soup incident.
It was listed as chicken noodle soup with matzo balls, but was well and truly shmaltz soup. The matzo balls themselves, about the size of a bumboozler marble, were light and tender and joined by a few corkscrews of cavatappi pasta. All very nice. The problem was a broth that was literally more fat than soup. After only a few spoonfuls, I had to throw in the napkin and, for the rest of the day, felt like I'd lost an oil wrestling match.
That is the only real dud, though, and there are a few dishes that do stand out, including a truly authentic poutine (with squeaky fresh curds and a thick, almost pasty deep orange gravy) and an expertly cooked AAA sirloin steak (a bargain at $19). The burgers, served on this year's de rigueur cutting boards, are sloppy and messy in the best possible way. There is a comforting salad of mixed greens with ranch dressing and southern fried chicken bits that probably has more calories than a deep-fried turducken.
An otherwise upstanding Reuben could use a zippier Russian dressing and really should be pan-fried to be strictly by the book. Similarly, the chicken in the clubhouse is spongy, soft and reminiscent of chicken loaf, although the white toast is mercifully yielding and the thick bacon is crispy.
The lack of truly exciting things coming out of the kitchen is reflected in the lack of excitement in the dining room. The place is not exactly packing them in. Maybe it's the cold, unwelcoming entrance or the disconnect between the chic hotel and the dowdy menu. The restaurant has a bit of an undecided air about it, as if the whole concept is just a stopgap and could be scrapped in a heartbeat. It's too bad because a diner is an ingenious solution to a hotel's need for an all-day restaurant. There's no reason to do away with the format altogether, but it would be nice if the effort put into the design was shown in the cooking.