More Canonical Menus...

Matt and I got to talk­ing about the sim­i­lar­ity of menus in some of the chain restau­rants around Van­cou­ver, namely the Cac­tus Club, Earl’s, Joey’s and Mile­stones, which led him to make this post, which had me ROFLMAO.(If you don’t know that acronym, it means I was amused).

Not to be out­done, I think there are other chains around here that have sim­i­lar menus, but these are the Cof­fee Houses. With the excep­tion of a few inde­pen­dent cof­fee houses sprin­kled here and there in the city (the Wicked Café being one of my all-time favourites) most of the cof­fee that is served in Van­cou­ver comes from the chains: Blenz, Seattle’s Best, JJ Bean, the higher-end Caffe Arti­giano, and of course, Star­bucks. The menu I’m talk­ing about here is not the cof­fee drinks, but instead the cakes, pas­tries and other items served along with the cof­fee. I could include that most Cana­dian of Insti­tu­tions, Tim Hor­tons, but for now I’m going to assume that although they do serve a lot of cof­fee there, it’s mainly to accom­pany their donuts. The same goes for Bread Gar­den, Bojan­gles and the count­less smaller chains that I can’t think of at the moment: the cof­fee is to accom­pany the other items on their menu, not the other way around. How­ever, if you could cre­ate a menu for the typ­i­cal Van­cou­ver Chain Café, let’s say Best JJ Blenziano-Bucks, it would look some­thing like this:

Best JJ Blenziano-Bucks

Oat cake that is prob­a­bly also good as a build­ing mate­r­ial
Fudgie Brownie thing
Dry as a bone Scone
Blue­berry Bar
Date Bar (just like Blue­berry bar but drier and ‘health­ier’)
Chewy Marsh­mal­low Treats Square (for the 4-year old in all of us)
Cin­na­mon Roll
Molasses Cookie
Mac­a­roons
Chocolate-dipped Mac­a­roons
Pump­kin or Banana Bread or Lemon Pound Cake (some­times avail­able in Reduced-fat ver­sions)
Cof­fee Cake
Very Dry Blue­berry muffin

Get the feel­ing the menu is mainly about sugar? I wish one could get ‘savory’ items at one of these cafes, like a plain crois­sant, ham and cheese crois­sant or a spinach crois­sant (like they had in Boston’s Star­bucks but appar­ently not on this coast). I also wouldn’t mind a Cor­nish Pasty, a soft pret­zel or maybe even pou­tines. (All right, maybe not those). Did some­one decide that cof­fee needed some­thing sweet with it, or are these other items beyond the stor­age capa­bil­i­ties of a Best JJ Blenziano-Bucks Café.