Dining Out: Plow and Harvest new on 170th
Restaurant: Plow and Harvest Address: 10041 170th St.
Information: 780-669-7500; plowandharvest.com Dinner for two, without liquor: about $50 Jumping on the local-food bandwagon, or perhaps more aptly, the haywagon, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Take Plow and Harvest, the latest city restaurant to brand itself with farm-fresh packaging, not only in its name and decor but in its use of Edmonton-area growers and producers.
This theme runs throughout the interior, from the photos of generic prairie scenes on the walls to the grassy centrepieces on the long, communal tables. (There are also smaller tables for two and four people). Odd bits of white picket fence are scattered around the room and a big, red tractor sits awkwardly by the entrance.
More notably, a chalkboard at the centre of the restaurant lists its local food suppliers, including The Good Oven Bakery, Pinocchio’s Ice Cream, The Little Potato Company, Irvings Farm Fresh Pork and Morinville Colony Farms. Local craft beers are also on the menu.
The restaurant’s use of local producers is certainly a positive, although its support of local food rings a bit hollow. The Plow and Harvest concept was created by an American restaurant consultant and, while it is owned by an Alberta company, the people behind it remain unnamed, according to a marketing spokesperson.
The Edmonton location is the first in the company’s plan for a western Canadian chain of “fresh-casual” eateries, and in that respect, the food does little to stand out from the expansive field of chain restaurants that have already put down roots in west Edmonton’s landscape.
The menu is straightforward and diner-inspired, forgoing appetizers for a list of three soups, some mealsized salads, a series of sandwiches and a few bigger plates of comfort foods like fried chicken, meat loaf and roast beef.
My own kids were perfectly happy with what they ate — a not-so-sloppy-joe (the menu name, not mine) with fries ($13), and a buttermilkfried chicken dinner with homemade coleslaw and a side of mac-and-cheese ($17). All were decent efforts — the sloppy joe as promised, a not-too-goopy hamburger concoction on a soft, slightly warm bun with crispy plank fries; the fried chicken, a couple of pieces of boneless breast in a light breading with a Dijon mustard coleslaw that my teenager pronounced some of the best he’d ever had. The macand-cheese side with crumbled bacon topping sounded more interesting than it tasted, which was on the bland and mushy side.
The meal-sized harvest salad ($13) of greens, blue cheese, dried cherries, apple slices and candied pecans was disappointing. It looked great, with fresh ingredients that would have worked together well had they not been burdened by an overly sweet maple vinaigrette and the cloying addition of nuts so candied they clung together in big, sugary clumps. My sweet tooth is legendary, and even I found the combination altogether too sweet.
Speaking of sweets, desserts are limited to three ingredients — cookies, frozen vanilla custard and soda, grouped together in different ways to form three desserts: a straight-up giant cookie (four varieties), an ice cream sandwich and a float.
The use of Edmonton’s own Pinocchio ice cream improved an otherwise crumbly and uninteresting pair of cookies in a giant sandwich ($7) that failed to impress either of my kids.
What did impress them was the free-flowing, selfserve Boylan’s all-natural soda (made in New Jersey) in a variety of cool flavours like black cherry and root beer. There’s also a selfserve water/lemonade/ice tea station.
Come to think of it, selfserve is another recurring theme at Plow and Harvest, which has borrowed the Famoso hybrid-service system of ordering at the counter but having servers deliver your food and clear your plates.
While the system seemed pointless enough at Famoso, uncomfortably outsourcing half the server’s job to the customer with no discernible savings for the employer, Plow and Harvest takes it several steps further: customers also get their own drinks and bring them to the table, and, as an additional annoyance, are required to pay and tip in advance, before they’ve received any food or service (unless you want to leave cash on the table after the meal instead, presuming you have cash handy.)
If you later decide you want dessert or coffee, you need to return to the counter to order, pay and tip again.
Luckily, the service was good (though delivering and removing plates is hard to mess up), and the servers were very friendly and sweet, another plus, according to my sons.
The only thing that rivalled the servers for their attention was the tabletop computer that offered games for couples, kids and families. We played a few fun rounds of “tough call” (a.k.a. “would you rather”), launching several deep discussions about whether we’d rather hiccup every 10 minutes or sneeze every time someone said our name, or whether we’d rather have a dolphin or a giraffe as a pet. (Son #1: “Why would you pick a dolphin? That’s ridiculous — like you’re going to keep him in the bathtub?” Son #2: “Oh, and a giraffe makes way more sense because you could just tie him up in the yard.”)
All games aside, Plow and Harvest is the kind of place you could go with your partner or your kids for a meal that would appease most, but truly impress few.
Put in “tough-call” terms, would you rather go to a pleasant-enough chain restaurant and eat decent food, at least some of which is grown and made locally, or go to a pleasantenough chain restaurant and eat decent food that comes from who knows where?