Teasing us for the past couple months, the sign for La Poutine has been up in the Garneau Theater area. They opened in the last few weeks, and we stopped by to try their poutine with "authentic squeaky cheese curds and handcut potatoes". La poutine is in a closet sized space - when you first walk in, you face the ordering counter with less than 5 chairs in the tinny tiny seating area to the left. The air is heavy with the smell of deep fried potatoes, the cashier is friendly and there is a small window behind the ordering counter where you can catch glimpses of kitchen activity.
There is quite a few permutations with what you can do with fries, cheese curds, beef or vegetarian gravy, and various meats (and peas). Two sizes of poutine are available, the regular is ~10x10x8cm cup, while the large size is comparable to a small chinese takeout container. The long lead-up to La Poutine's opening culminated in a rather soggy and mediocore performance.
Granny's Poutine
Basically a bunch of soggy skin on fries topped with a few pieces of salty panfried diced chicken breast, a good handful of squeaky cheese curds and a scoop of over-salted pale brown thin gravy. Its then topped off with a sprinkle of boiled frozen peas. The cheese curds pass - nice and squeeky and fresh, but the fries quickly become very soggy as the thin and oversalted gravy make quick work of turning the fries into sponges. Not much flavor to the gravy, its so oversalted, salty quickly becomes an understatement.
The Quebecois
A handful of warmish soggy fries are topped with a handful of squeaky cheese curds, a super salty thin gravy and a slice or two of moist Montreal smoked meat cut into little thin squares. The Montreal smoked meat was nice and moist - though for an extra $2, having a slice of cut up deli meat seemed a bit like price gouging. The Quebecois idea is good, but unfortunately, the super salted gravy in addition to the salty Montreal smoked meat made it incredibly difficult to finish the poutine. The gravy was strangely so thin, though it was poured overtop of the fries, it seemed the gravy bypassed the fries altogether and gathered in the bottom of the poutine cup to form a salt lick.
Overall, this poutine-ary is in a great location, close to campus and open late close to Whyte Ave. Despite the fact I usually enjoy supporting new and upcoming food places, or places with new food concepts within Edmonton, it is only their location close to the University campus and Whyte Ave that will continue to sustain them. For their rather extravagant prices for poutine, until they improve their watery and oversalted gravy, I'd much rather pay simular and get tastier higher quality poutine at The Cheese Factory, or get an inexpensive low quality poutine at New York Fries. That is, unless you have a hypotension problem... having one of their poutines would shoot you straight into the high blood pressure column.
La Poutine Edmonton
Address 8720-109 Street Edmonton, AB
Phone(780) 757-7222
Hours Mon-Wed 11am-10pm Thurs-Sat 11am-2am, Sun 11am-8pm
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3 comments:
Yah, I totally agree, it's overpriced, too salty and is essentially a poor copy cat of Cheese Factory - they even use Cheese Factory's cheese curds! For an $8 poutine, I'd much rather have the $8 truffle gravy poutine at Charcut or even the $6 large poutine at NY Fries.
Just have the traditional and know what a traditional poutine is.
Don't put down Hew York Fries though- their Butter chicken poutine is great..... a thoroughly Canadian fusion food too!
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