Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. I’m a very messy eater. I’m such a messy eater, in fact, that it’s rather surprising that I’m not followed around by a pack of hungry pigeons and raccoons. Examine any table that I’ve been eating at and you will be able to tell instantly where I was sitting, because the placemat will be hidden beneath a carpet of scraps and crumbs, as will the chair, the floor, and (on a bad night) other diners. It’s not unknown for dinner companions to have a pool on how long it will take before I spill soup on my shirt.
One of my dreams is to find a good, low-key restaurant with a decent selection of vegetarian food where I can become enough of a regular to be able to order dinner with a lobster bib.
I may have found it.
Hillview Restaurant is a fairly new place, having inauspiciously opened on September 11th. It is located in a fairly obscure little shopping plaza on the west side. You have to look for it; you won’t stumble across it by accident. It is a family style place with a mixture of booths and tables, with a bar and function room in the back. It’s open seven days a week for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Dinners are slightly fancier than lunches. It is the sort of place you could imagine grabbing dinner with the guys on your bowling league or going on a second date.
At first glance, the menu doesn’t look all that impressive. The dishes are fairly standard – pizza, subs, salads, pasta, poutine, pork pie – fairly standard, middle-of-the-road family dishes. A second look however, raises an eyebrow. All the soups are homemade. The tomato sauce is homemade. The pizza dough is… well, you get the point. Everything is fairly simple, but extremely well done.
The menu is in no way aimed at vegetarians but, at the same time is vegetarian-friendly. It doesn’t take a lot of creativity to have a very, very good meatless meal there.
Although it wasn’t on the menu, I ordered an eggplant parmesan sandwich ($4.00). A veal parmesan sandwich was listed and I noticed that one of the pasta dishes came with eggplant, so I decided to take a chance. I’m glad I did – it was outstanding, mostly due to the homemade tomato sauce. If you are a tomato sauce snob, this sandwich alone is worth a visit.
There are four or five pasta dishes on the lunch menu, which come with ziti, linguini or ravioli. The linguini with garlic, olive oil and tomatoes ($5.25) seemed a little subtle (well, ok – bland) until I added salt, pepper and parmesan cheese.
I ended up having three helpings of it.
Interestingly enough, the pasta was served with fresh cherry tomatoes, rather than the chopped tomatoes I had expected. This gave it a really nice fruity taste that it wouldn’t have had otherwise.
As a sort of an acid test, I ordered coleslaw and French fries ($1.95 each). These were both good, but nothing to write home about. This is a pity, because one of my lifelong goals is to find coleslaw that is worth writing about.
As a token nod to the breakfast menu, I ordered a grilled English muffin ($1.25). Unlikely as it seems, you can tell almost everything you need to know about a restaurant’s breakfasts from one muffin. If it is grilled properly – golden brown, crunchy, salty and still tender, you can be reasonably certain that there is enough attention to detail to do a decent omelet.
I would order an omelet here.
It was as I was reaching for the muffin that I dragged my sleeve through the tomato sauce. Unfortunately, I was oblivious to it at the time and ended up saucing the rest of the table before I saw the stain. Before I could do anything about the mess, the waitress was at my elbow with a glass of club soda and a napkin to blot my sleeve. I hadn’t asked her for help, but fortunately, she was more observant that I was.
I like the Hillview. I’d feel comfortable asking them for a bib.
