Knight and Day

Knight and Day
Several locations in Vancouver
1061 Denman Street (Location visited)
Vancouver, BC

I am sure that some of you who visit this blog comes with the expectation of finding information about restaurants. With a similar line of thought, I do that “research” by visiting other fellow bloggers sites – just check my blogroll to the right for places I visit. While I am sure we will focus more often on recommended places or those where we have a positive feedback, there is also the negative one… How so? For some reason, Sherman (of Sherman’s Food Adventures) kept telling me “Don’t go to ABC or Knight and Day” and instead of me avoiding it completely, it was like that proverbial moth to a flame… Yup, it means I went to Knight and Day!

Out of all possible locations, I went to the one closest to my workplace: Denman. I do remember there used to be a hot dog shop and it was then closed for a long period of time, making that place a real eye sore. Now, whether having a Knight and Day there was a better option was something I was about to find out.

After been seated (“choose any table” – of course, I chose the window!), I started looking at the menu. Before I continue, my line of thought about places like Knight and Day (or ABC and so on): as long as you stick with the “safe” options, you should be pretty much OK. If you deviate to anything “interesting”, chances are you will be burned. However, still, there was one item that was “featured” that week and couldn’t help myself order it because, in a way, it should be pretty difficult to mess. If they mess that one out, there should be no hope for this place. And that dish was…

Their steak sandwich: “Juicy flame grilled 6 oz Steak topped with onion rings and served over garlic bread”. Similar to what happened in my visit to Score on Davie, I went for greens, rather than fries. What I did not know was that it also came with some coleslaw on the side. Had I known this in advance, I would have gone for the fries instead.

Being among those who will eat anything on the plate, I started with the coleslaw. They had that crunchy coleslaw texture but, past that, they were awful. It might have had a hint of dressing but that worked against the coleslaw: Had it had none, my expectation would have been that of raw cabbage. In this case, what was served had a bitter taste. No, that was it, nothing sweet or oily hint in the background, just bitter.

The “garden” salad came with a side of raspberry vinaigrette. In this case, it was the completely opposite of the coleslaw: No matter how much vinaigrette I added, it couldn’t “kill” some odd bitterness the raw vegetable had. I have the odd feeling they were not necessarily “fresh” but from a bag waiting to be served and had been sitting there for a while. Feel free to call it epic fail…

Finally, the steak on top of a garlic bread. The onion rings (shown in one of the pictures at the top) was a nice touch, specially considering I did not have the fries. However, calling it “garlic” bread might be a stretch, as it did not have that much garlic flavour. Had it been called au jus, it might had been more accurate. I ordered the steak to be medium rare but it approached more to the medium point as seen in the picture above. I will admit it was a bit better than I expected, though I must also add my expectations were quite low. Not extremely tender but it was easily cut with the knife. Not much side sauce but it was OK, as you could taste the steak as a steak.

After finishing my meal, it took some time for the bill to arrive and for them to take the payment. During that in-between period, I was noticing the waitresses were having some interesting chat with other (older generation in some case) customers. I might be overstating the obvious here but it seems they are their target market, not somebody like me. But, putting that aside, despite the sandwich was decent (the salads were crappy), overall, I feel it wasn’t worth the $$$ I had to fork for this meal. For less $$$, the sandwich from Eh! Restaurant looks way better (and this is despite I did not actually taste it). But, then again, it is not for me…

Tagged under: Chain Restaurant • Downtown • Lunch • Sandwich • Vancouver • West End