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Photo credit: CosmicMands

There’s a place on 424 West Pender where a vixen greets you and tempts you with the tantalizing treats placed strategically on her daily menu.

Step inside and and you begin to feel the cultural mosaic that makes up Canada. Something that I feel is taken for granted today.

Smile Restaurant bills itself as a Chinese-Canadian restaurant. It’s a rare place where breakfast anytime of the day is served alongside Chinese cuisine. A place where kitschy art from yesteryear mingles with grapes rescued from the final death-throws of that Italian restaurant you used to visit as a child. Gigantic booths resemble those little Tilt-a-Whirl carriages.

Photo credit: CosmicMands

And if this wasn’t enough, there’s the waitresses. Armed with contagious smiles and great attitudes, Smile Restaurant from the outset really does try to turn that frown upside down.

But then comes the food. Most of the Ghetto Breakfast Club members ordered standard breakfast items. These included:

• The Breakfast Special - Three eggs cooked any style, toast (brown or white), hashbrowns and sausage, bacon or ham ($4.95).
• The Clubhouse Sandwich and Fries.
• Grilled Cheese with Fries and Soup ($5.50).
• BLT with Fries and Soup
• Coffee ($1.75)
• Milkshakes (Chocolate)
• and finally just Toast

The coffee was warm of a mediocre quality. Everything else was covered in a thick layer of recycled oil. A faint hint of fish permeated through all food items (most likely due to the reuse of vat oil). In fact, the fish scent was so strong for our lone vegetarian member that she had to forgo her meal because the sight of her fish-scented breakfast made her nauseous. Even our local french fry connoisseur exclaimed that her french fries “were the worst [she's] ever tasted!”. Though the milkshakes were delicious, everything else was substandard. If you could ignore the fish scent within the food, then for the most part the items were cooked okay. Eggs were hit and miss, hash browns crispy (a good thing) and the meat was so-so. I ordered eggs sunny side up and had to return them when I was presented with fried egg whites and what looked like uncooked yellows. The cheerful waitresses obliged with a smile.

Photo credit: CosmicMands

Smile Restaurant though is one of those places where you don’t go for the food. It’s a place to go for people watching when you’re thirsty (I highly recommend the milkshakes). It’s a place to go when you’re really hungry and don’t care what goes into your belly. In some aspects, Smile Restaurant reminded me of the breakfast version of Vancouver’s former 3AM haunt: Fresgo’s.

Together the great service, decor, ambiance, booths and great conversations helped earn Smile Restaurant the following rating:

Tags: avoid at all costs, avoid this place, caution, don't go here, fish flavour fries, fish oil, Ghetto Breakfast Club, Ghetto Breakfast Club Event, it's a front for drugs, low toast rating alert, one and a half toasts, really gross, Review, Smile Restaurant, Vancouver, warning, weird art