Yesterday, I was talking with a co-worker of mine, George, about something. Somehow, the conversation turned to the restaurant The Old Spaghetti Factory. I said the food wasn’t very good there. George, being from Toronto, hadn’t been there since he was a young teenager and his memory of it was neither pleasant nor unpleasant.
I told him I hadn’t been there in well over a decade but I was almost sure the food hadn’t gotten better. Back in day, and this is going a ways back now, I used to eat meals from a dining hall in my undergrad years at university. The dining hall used to serve spaghetti. It was very bland and very much institutionalized pasta. They wouldn’t drain the pasta all the way so there was a lot of water mixed in with the meat sauce on your plate. It was so watery that the pasta would easily swim around on the plate at the slightest touch.
One summer after either my first or second year of undergrad, I went to The Old Spaghetti Factory with some people. I ordered, strangely enough, spaghetti with meat sauce. I thought that I would be getting some excellent pasta given the restaurant’s name. When my plate of spaghetti arrived, the server put it in front of me. I looked down to see the pasta swimming in water on the plate. The action of putting it down on the table nearly caused most of my pasta to slide off the plate. Here was university dining hall pasta at nearly twice the price. It didn’t taste any better either. That was the last time I went to The Old Spaghetti Factory.
So back to the present day. George and I talked about TOSF so much, we decided to go there for dinner tonight just to see how bad it could be. We managed to convince our lead and another software engineer to come with us. Both of them also had prior knowledge of the dubious quality of TOSF but they went anyways.
We arrived at the Gastown location of TOSF a little after 7pm. It was packed with fools and tourists. We asked the host how long of a wait it would be. He said ten to fifteen minutes. We were shocked that we would have to wait for disappointment but we put down our names anyways. Ten minutes of waiting went by and not a single group got seated in that time. I made an executive decision that we weren’t going to wait for disappointment any longer! I decided to take our dinner to the Flux Bistro, one block away.
Usually Flux is a great place to eat but we all had a very average dinner. I had some sorta ostrich stir-fry and it was not good.
We have not abandoned our plans for TOSF. We will go and be disappointed in the near future.
Holy cow… only a couple days ago, at work, there was a conversation about puking. Somebody mentioned the last time they got sick was after eating at The Old Spaghetti Factory. So, as I begin to read your post, I recall some of the comments this person made. The one that really stuck out was when he said he couldn’t remember why he even went. It was like he “got fooled like a tourist”. LOW AND BEHOLD… you used those very same words in the same sentence in your post! IT’S A SIGN FROM THE LORDS OF KOBOL! Don’t return to those premises!
I recall going to TOSF in California when I was a kid and loving it.But I was a kid. I also loved the elementary school cafeteria spaghetti.
You know when I read KOBOL, I read that as COBOL… the programming language. *sigh*Anyways, despite the great likihood of puking, I think we’re still going ahead with this thing. I guess this makes us certified fools.