After Karin’s appointment yesterday, we ended up at Metrotown as there was no point in joining the rush hour crawl. We needed to eat, but didn’t want to spend too much, as we’ve had a number of these unavoidable dining out experiences as of late. As we’ve watching what we eat, we also didn’t want to eat in the food court. We therefore headed straight for a mall directory, but unfortunately Lush was located between the escalator we came up and the closest directory.
After a detour, we consulted the directory. Metropolis at Metrotown, which is what the name of the mall actually is, now has over 470 stores since the merger of the two malls into one, and so we expected that the list of restaurants to be impressive. In reality, there was not much interesting, and Karin suggested T.G.I. Friday’s. This left me in much the same dilemma as when we had gone to the Cactus Club Coquitlam, as my previous experiences with Friday’s have not been memorable.
When Friday’s first came to Robson Street, it was known as a very trendy restaurant and, like many, I looked forward to trying it. I remember my impression being that the menu was unexciting and the food was bland. It was year’s later before I tried it again, when Karin and I took her youngest son Colby to the Metrotown location during a day of shopping at Christmas 2003. Once again, I left with the same impression. However, as Cactus Club’s improvements had been a pleasant surprise on our last outing, I did agree to try Friday’s.
We were lead into the back of the restaurant, which is much larger than I thought. I was pleased to find that pints of Canadian were on sale, but upon consulting the drinks menu I realized that the sale price was barely below the regular price. I therefore ordered a pint of Kokanee, only to be told that they no longer carry it in favour of MGD, though in the next sentence the server called it MGD; so I was unsure if he was speaking of Labatt Genuine Draft or Miller Genuine Draft. Either way, it was not an impressive start to have out of date menus. Karin had some wine, and I went with a pint of Canadian.
The food menu, once again, did little to excite me. Similar to the Cactus Club, the list of appetizers contained nothing special; and so like before, we went with the spinach dip. This was partially because Karin had been on a two week diet of no starches, and wanted some now that her appointment had marked the end of diet. The choice of a main course took me longer than Karin, which is a rarity; largely because there was little on the menu that I could eat and feel I had stayed healthy. In the end, Karin ordered chicken strips and fries, and I ordered battered shrimp. Neither was a very healthy meal, but we were working with a menu that limited such choices.
The dip was accompanied with a large helping of fresh tortillas chips, but they were simply store bought chips. The dip itself was OK, but nothing special; not very impressive for what sounded like the best item on the appie menu.
Our meals arrived, and mine turned out to be butterfly shrimp battered in bread-crumbs; which did not really match the description from the menu of “lightly battered” shrimp. Again, they were OK, but nothing special. Karin’s chicken strips were battered much like beer battered fish, and she gave me the first one to try. It was average tasting, and so was her first one; but then the rest seemed too doughy to her. We ended up tearing the last two apart; attempting to find where the battered ended and the chicken began, but we were not able to identify such a point. Most of her meal had turned out to be chicken fritters rather than strips.
The final bill was a savings over what we would have paid at the Cactus Club or Sammy J. Peppers, both of which we could see across Kingsway from our table. However, even if you subtracted the drinks, it still was more than we would have paid at the food court, and yet it was not any healthier or tastier. The only plus over the food court was the availability of alcoholic drinks, and they had already disappointed me there with the inaccurate menu. Overall, I give T.G.I. Friday’s a 5 out of 10.
