Mother Nature’s Cafe

$10.95
“Grilled vegetables, caramelized onions, balsamic goat cheese & freshly picked basil.”

4/5

My first time here, quite a nice cafe jointed to a beautiful garden center. It has a gorgeous display of loose leaf teas, I found the orange pekoe quite nice. The full panini comes with a side of greens, soup and beverage, I tried one of the greens and unfortunately it wasn’t for me. The panini was amazing, every ingredient with its distinct flavor creating an experience of awesome for each of my taste buds. What caught my eye mostly about this place, as I’ve been following them on Facebook, is that they have quite a fair share of non-meat options, though I think they specialize in daily soups and teas which means a limited menu. The staff was super nice, and it was almost full on the Monday noon time I attended. Due to the location, which honestly is still closer to most than Crescent Heights, I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to go there, although it is tasty and I do hope to try again, perhaps if I were shopping for gardening supplies with a friend it would be a good place to stop.

In light of certain recent events, I thought this topic deserved a post. There’s always two sides to every complaint. You can’t please everyone. Some lessons I learned a while back when similarly sharing something negative myself, and posting it on Medicine Hat Media.

As a co-owner of Medicine Hat Media, a person who runs a personal business, is employed by another business, and partakes in the offerings of other businesses, it is of my opinion that complaints and criticisms of businesses in Medicine Hat are not only important, but vital  to both parties. We provide a service for consumer complaints to speak out against bad business and service, but we also provide that same service for businesses to promote themselves (for free), and like recently, provide a forum for businesses to represent themselves how they so choose. This creates a non-bias, non-partial, open and local environment for these topics and more.

We allow local businesses to advertise written content on our site for free! What other source locally with our reach allows something like this? But as typical humans, we love to hate, or hate to love negativity. Let’s compare comments on positive articles versus negative ones. There’s a post a couple down that promotes a showcase of local businesses with 0 comments for an example. It’s kind of sad really. It makes me wonder, what’s the point of offering this service to businesses when so rarely, they use it at all.

As Medicine Hat Media is a free, non-profit, public-driven blog, we allow an open forum of speech between any party and any person, no matter what their opinion is. As long as their written content provides a valid criticism, provides positive and negative points, appears to be factual (see definition of defamation), and encourages/allows comments for disagreement or agreement we will allow it.

Unlike publications, newspapers, and other forms of advertising-based media, we have the opportunity to do something unique for our users, readers, and writers. Let’s not ruin that.

And in that spirit, you are free to comment that you disagree or agree with me. If enough people are in opposition, then I am open to change (for example, removing a post). That’s the beauty of it.

abc Country Restaurant

$10.99
“A garden burger patty made of soy protein, onions, cooked brown rice, mushrooms, spinach, rolled oats, mozzarella cheese, feta cheese, olive oil, parmesan cheese and garlic on a toasted multigrain bun with burger sauce.”

3 / 5

Gardenburgers are my favorite kind of veggie burgers because they don’t try to imitate meat, but rather make something different and delicious. This certain patty looks and tastes like the actual Gardenburger brand patties you can buy from the store, which Superstore apparently doesn’t stock any more so if you know where some are please comment and tell me where, I miss them! Anyway, it has the traditional toppings (lettuce, tomatoes, onions), and some special burger and mayo sauce. It wasn’t exactly bad in anyway, but it wasn’t trying to be anything special. I would like to mention that burger combos at ABC come with endless wedges/fries (which were good but not special either). Given the chance, I wouldn’t order this again, I have many other preferences which I will cover in the future. The restaurant was empty between lunch and supper on a Saturday when we went, so the service was good.

This post is in response to my earlier post “Does Rossco’s Pub take it’s customers seriously?” It has come to my attention that I may have misread the context of a joke that a waitress at Rossco’s Pub made one night.  I have to sincerely apologize for my poor decision to not have more patience while waiting for a response.  I have since been informed that it was a misunderstanding and would like to withdraw my particular complaint about the restaurant.  I am willing to take their word that it was not meant as a detriment and would like to move on.  It seems that Rossco’s Pub takes its customers very seriously and for that I commend them.  Thank you.

The answer is “yes” as stated by the original poster, “Chettar”, after talking with the owner of Rossco’s and coming to an agreement. The original complaint that was located here has been deleted as both parties want to move forward on the issue. The follow up to this post, Mistaken Context at Rossco’s is available here. I commend both parties for working this out. -A message from Vaughn.

Twist

$10.99
“Pasta with chicken, mushrooms and veggies in a creamy sundried tomato sauce with a sprinkling of fresh parmesan.”

3.5 / 5

This would be my first time at the Twist Wine Bistro and Restaurant, a cozy small place downtown. When I first saw the menu I was skeptical of my options; deep fried cheese, deep fried artichoke, or deep fried yams. Twist serves authentic Italian cuisine so I was unsure of what I would like, knowing I like cheese I figured I would go with that but at the time they didn’t have manchego cheese so feeling somewhat frustrated I got the pasta of the day minus the chicken. I prefer to order meals where the meat isn’t the focus, but they were very accommodating and put in extra veggies without me requesting it. I had a good share of red wine, and some bread with oil dip as an appetizer. The bread and oil were straight forward, I had some difficulty scooping up the stuff at the bottom so that was a waste of calories. I think the pasta would have been better with a different type of noodle, I guess that’s more of a personal preference, same with not liking olives. It had a nice subtle rose sauce and a variety of vegetables, it was good but not incredibly delicious, I wouldn’t order it again. The place was basically empty on that Thursday night, the service was great.

We have some guest posts this time around for our best restaurant picks of 2010. Did it really take us this long to post it? I was originally going to write about how the Medicine Hat College cafeteria has the best wraps I have ever had, but the cafeteria is not really a restaurant, so I omitted my pick this year and let the others share their insights.

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Local Public Eatery

by @DustyMelling

With locations in Vancouver and Edmonton I’m not sure how local they are, but they definitely use the local theme to their advantage with references such as “City Hall: The hardest working person? The window cleaner.” The waitresses have been very enthusiastic, and the atmosphere is dim yet sparkling. They also feature the chefs up front by the doors, the menus are on a folded map of downtown, and the place is all around well designed, even the table tops are neat.

“It’s common food done uncommonly well”, as said on the website and I must say – I do agree. Being vegetarian can be tricky eating out, and the menu is somewhat limited, but this is where the best veggie burger in the world* is made, FRESH every time, with tons of DELICIOUS toppings, on a poppy seed bun. The normal fries are cut in shoestring-style similar to McDonalds and served in a bucket (that’s right – a bucket), and the yam fries are sweet and subtly amazing. The guacamole is brought to the table and you can decide how much of what you want in it and they mash it right there just to show HOW DARN FRESH it is, this and the queso cheese dip in Duo of Dips are both terrific.

There’s really too much about it simply tell, I highly recommend going yourself for a unique and tasty experience. THE JUMP – Read the rest of this entry »

Inspire Studio and Gallery on 2nd Street downtown has expanded to include a wonderful café. I’ve gone there a couple times in the past week and was greeted with great service each time. I am excited to see that they carry The Pop Shoppe drinks along with my favourite flavour, black cherry. According to our server they will have wireless internet available in the future as well. I will list the hours below but I was particularly excited to see that they are open until 10pm on Wed-Fri.

If you plan on checking it out around lunch time I would arrive a little early as the place was packed and a couple people were waiting for a table to open up. Not to mention the parking on 2nd street seems to be in much higher demand. The portions may seem small to some but the food we had was quite good and I was full afterwards anyways. Our club sandwiches cost us $7.00 while our soup and salad (I chose the julienne carrots with a citrus/cumin dressing) were an extra $2.00. I meant to take a picture of the menu as well but alas, I forgot. Some other items were a vegetable shepherd’s pie or baked potato with various toppings including chili. They have an assortment of delicious looking deserts as well. Definitely going back to try the apple cake next time.

The atmosphere of the café is quite welcoming as well. Since it is a part of the Inspire Gallery there is a lot of interesting and diverse art peppered throughout the café. I was impressed with the condition of the old floors and the red tables and white walls provide a really nice contrast.

Also, here are the hours the gallery and café are open (taken from Inspire Studio and Gallery facebook page):

“Inspire Studio & Gallery has moved into its new location and Inspire Café is now open at 669 (Studio)-675 (Café) 2nd Street S.E. Studio hours are Tuesday to Saturday 12:00-5:00pm. Café hours are Mon-Tues 9:00am-5:00pm, Wed-Fri 9:00am-10:00pm, Saturday 9:00am-5:00pm and Sunday 11:00am-4:00pm.”

If you want to read more about how the café came to be here is an article in the Medicine Hat News from December of last year: http://www.medicinehatnews.com/life/12292010.html

The interior and exterior facelift for the Dunmore Road Moxie’s has been completed, prompting Taylor and I to give the trendy looking restaurant a try.

While looking at the exterior to Moxie’s it is visible that they have had a large expansion and upon entering the front doors, you can immediately see the new elegance the restaurant has to offer. New decor and bottles of wine behind glass paned cupboards add a strong tone of class to the newly decorated building. Much of the furniture is dark with coloured highlights and the lighting is low with simulated fireplaces, almost creating a romantic atmosphere.

The lounge has been revamped and incorporates what looks like a much larger bar. The tables look comfortable and the chairs, as usual in lounges, are quite high.

The seating in the restaurant side of Moxie’s, as usual to contrast a lounge, is much lower. Unfortunately the aforementioned romantic atmosphere is somewhat impaired by the close proximity of the tables and the noise levels which can become quite roaring.

The food quality was good despite the menu seeming rather small and limited. The lunch menu; however, adds about 10 or 12 more choices. Unfortunately the prices seemed to be raised a little more from before, so a meal costs around $16 on average. Combined with drinks, a meal for 2 will in most cases come out to over $40.

An additional downside is that there is not much seating available if you are waiting for a table on a busy night. Fortunately, servers come through periodically to serve wine to people waiting for a table.

Definitely, my favourite part about Rossco’s Pub is the daily lunch specials. More on that later, but for now, what’s different about Rossco’s Pub? Well, for the sake of this review, I will mostly be talking about the food itself. Even though I’ve drank there several times – it’s more or less the same as any random pub/bar in town with a couple unique specials thrown in for good measure. A pub is normally defined by it’s atmosphere and food. The atmosphere leaves a lot of be desired, but the food is good. For some reason, I’m drawn to pub food even if I am not drinking and that applies to Rossco’s as well. Take what you want from that, but as some of you know, I’ve already already admitted to liking “unhealthy” food, “the more grease the better” half-jokingly of course, in my Buffet Medicine Hat review.

I’ve eaten quite a bit off the menu, from burgers, platters of special fries, joe joe’s, dry ribs, wings, sandwiches – and every time it’s been pretty good. Lately, well less lately in the present, I used to stop in at least once a week for their lunch special. It’s an ever changing soup and sandwhich combo. My favourite was a tomato vegetable style soup with a pulled beef sandwich, or maybe the chicken noodle soup with the mini-pizza sandwhich. It’s pretty varied too. There was even borscht once! My new favourite has to be the new “Chicken Bites” which is a boneless-alternative to wings with any wing sauce you want!

They have recently (as of a couple months ago) changed their menu and some of the menu items as well. There’s lots new to check-out and try.