The Benedict Chronicles: The Lakeview Lunch (New Management!)
May 3 2010
"...as plate after plate of fluffy poached eggs, cartilaginous peameal, and lakes of sunshiney goo continued to pile up over time, I realized that if I don't start catalogueing these excursions in some formal manner, a great field of human knowledge would be lost. Hence, the Benedict Chronicles..."
The Lakeview Lunch was the first Benedict Chronicle published on this blog, four-ish years ago. It's closed and reopened since then, under new management, and finding myself back in the spot with four other enthusiastic benny-eaters, we ordered a whole table of the things, and weighed the new against the old.
A few things are different about the Lakeview right off the bat: it's a 24-hour joint now, which certainly hasn't cut down on its Sunday-morning bustle; it's got a bunch more options on the benny menu (peameal, strip bacon, spinach, sauteed mushrooms, and salmon are among the variants); and a benny now costs $11.50, up from nine dollars.
Oddly enough, I commented last time that $9 was too expensive for what I was getting at the Lakeview, and that hasn't changed - the first thing I noticed about the new benny was that it's a surprisingly small affair. What I can only call Pygmy English muffins form the base of the dish, and the poached eggs are the size of a golf ball. A modest splatter of hollandaise and (in my case) the sauteed mushrooms make up the rest, and the plate is eked out by a (small) portion of home fries and a (small) portion of salad. Small, small, small... and yet this costs nearly twelve bucks??
Sure, the market scale on benedicts in this town has risen with the popularity of brunch, but to pay more money to get less food than I got last time (when I was already feeling ripped off) is just unfortunate, especially given the management switch.
The benny itself was strictly middle of the road - the hollandaise has an unusual (though not unpleasant) tang to it, and the eggs were on the high side of medium, a bit too cooked to really flow across the tongue. It was crowded as fuck on Sunday morning, so I suspect warming lamps. And I was wedged into the back of a small booth with four other people, so perhaps circumstances played a larger-than-usual role.
The home fries, incidentally, are magnificent. They are visually identical to the old Lakeview home fries, but taste about 600% better.
Still, there's no way around the less-is-not-more feeling I was left with at the end of this meal. Don't let the photo fool you - take away the citrus rinds and the bucket of ketchup, and only 2/3rds of that plate is covered with food. The new Lakeview underperforms its predecessor.
The Lakeview Lunch can be found at 1132 Dundas West, at Ossington. The Benedict Chronicles is an ongoing, non-regular series.