Mathieu "Button Masher" Y.'s Profile

This is one of my regular quick stop meals in the city, and sometimes I have craved it enough to actually travel to the Granville strip, cut through the hordes of make up infested bridge people, and wait in line for one of these gems.

These are donairs made proper! The meat's cut from their large rotissery hunk, the toppings are somewhat fresh, the tzatziki sauce is mildly spiced yogurt, and the final product doesnt come weirdly salty or soggy. Although if you're going to try downing it and stumbling down the street, you might face some serious fashion faux pas'

The staff are usually incredibly well composed for the demand of this position, and face the lines of drunks with pleasantry and calmness. However, it may be best to try to enter these doors before the rush of post-club last-call intoxication does.

A single donair makes for a filling dinner, and without that awkward fast food brick in your stomach digestion of burgers and/or pizza. I would recommend the lamb or chicken meats!

Lucy's may not be the best 24 hour diner in the Pacific Northwest, but it does offer some pretty great food for you and your rowdy pals at 2am. The staff seem used to rushes in the dead of night, and seem to enjoy the chit chat that comes with it. In fact, I would say you're likely to get bad service if you act like an asshole, but that's true everywhere, right?

The burgers are pretty awesome, the mac n cheese is simple comfort food done simply, and the milkshakes are the topic of raves. But I have a secret! Mix peanut butter and chocolate, or oreo, flavor together in that cup and taste bliss... if only they served rum in the mix at 2am. MAYBE... just MAYBE if you leave an extra extra sized tip...

Prices are not amazing, but much cheaper than Denny's, and on par with the late night Pho restaurants a few blocks away. Otherwise, why would you want to eat at 7-11, even if you could save a few dollars? That's not even real food, they actually cook here!

I ended up coming here after a gig one night and catching a cab with the server after his shift. How friendly is that?!

Opticana is one of the weird stores you never think about or notice until you need to go, despite it's downtown location. But inside they have rows upon rows of frames on display for the unreasonably cheap price of FREE. As long as you have a prescription for them to fill, that is. In addition to prescriptions, they have more "vintage" plastic frames than bang on could ever hope to have shoplifted for $10!

The service is helpful, two quiet ladies are staffing the place nearly every time I've gone. They will make honest comments/compliments on the look of frames and were incredibly patient with me as I tried on contact lenses for my cuss filled, impatient, and painful first time. They even remembered me from when I bought glasses!

Prescriptions are filled reasonably quickly, at 3-5 days, but don't trust them to call you back on time for them... I made the wise decision of calling them first!

Their contact lense prices are a little higher than most places, but they offer a fitting and month trial for $30, deducted off the price if you fill your prescription with them later.

Surprisingly, I've only seen other people in this store once during my many visits and complaints about my contact lenses. So if you want quick, yet patient, service at good prices... check this place out! If you want brand name frames and such, probably skip out.

This location is great for listening to classic pop and warming up while you're waiting for friends, subtly mixing their fountain pop with whiskey in the booth. It's right on the corner of Commercial and Broadway, where any direction of travel is possible! And it's open late, so you can start your night where ever you want!

But also, the food is the same as any A&W, which is to say it's above par on quick serve diner burgers. And the staff are nice enough to put up with some severe bullshit, including mine but also much worse. Sometimes I have friends that act a little crazy, too. And yet, we have not been banned. Thanks, guys!

Thanks to Robin M and the Donnelly Group for a great introduction to single occupancy washrooms! Yes, that's right, they had EIGHT of them, covered in mirrors and posters and with toilets that had both a laser sight and a button in case the laser didnt work. And soap, and a sink, and a lot of surfaces to insufflate various powders with your nose.

They started off pretty clean when I showed up, after my first order of a tasty yet tangy lemon whiskey hybrid thing in a martini glass. Something by Beck was playing and magic was in the air at the pool table when I first had to go. But WHICH ONE TO PICK. Wait, what? Thats usually only a question of TWO, like YES or NO, like AM I A BOY OR A GIRL.

But then I took a seat and started chatting with some people about where to stash a ridiculously salty hot dog, racing to the bottom of the punch bowl when BAM gotta go again. I chose the SAME WASHROOM as I did the first time, probably out of habit, and IT WAS GETTING MESSED UP. Like toilet paper on the floor weird puddle on the seat MESSED UP.

And then I had some familiar Granville Island brews and a super smooth root beer flavoured cocktail and checked out the bathroom AGAIN. Devastation. So I looked in all the bathrooms, taking this opportunity to really soak in the Bimini's ambience.

Then tried a burger slider, which was pretty tasty, and the chili, which was spiced and salty but not hot, and checked out the jukebox, which had a pretty awesome cross reference of cool (including Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. wut?) I didnt get a chance to check on the bathrooms because we left right after, but I did notice people playing tetris on the entrance to them.

Also, hippy paintings, darkly lit, booths and wood tables, looks like a lot of Donnelly would. I wouldn't normally go here, but you might, so you should try it.

What Gold Train has in neon it lacks in... well, nothing really. As a casual pho eater I really did not mind the food, the service, or the "seedy" drunks in this place looking for a bite to eat before heading home. Maybe you just need to be laughing to get good service, or too smashed to care when you're actually leaving? Maybe this is a 24 hour place that actually expects drunks, and they seem like experts at handling them.

We got recommended some pretty good first time pho there, the special tasted awesome, and my date only had reservations about eating the tripe, which makes sense when you consider it's just fat. We threw in enough hot sauce to clean our sinuses for a month and went about sobering up for the next hour. The atmosphere is definitely very casual, drunk dudes and slutty girls reeking of vodka and cheap perfume and the bus boy handling bills near the end of the night. Fill your own cup with tea and etc.

The layout of the place is so interesting as well, a little box in the middle of the parking lot with room for 15 or so booths, always seems crowded but it's never too busy...

This place is definitely more fun and nutritious than the 711 next door. and you won't be driving when you eat here, hopefully, so it's not like you have very many other choices. Wait, fun AND nutritious? What!?!

First impressions mean a lot, especially when you make them at the bar on Christmas. My date and I came in for a drink and small meal before heading to our respective families for the holidays. Cheap drink specials and $5.95 meal service  were well above what we expected from any bar on the Granville strip.

And they were treating their lonely Christmas clientelle quite well indeed. She got a Sol's and a spicy chicken wrap with fries, I had a Sailor Jerry's rum and eggnog on ice. The mexican beer complimented her food well, which actually looked, smelled, and tasted like it was made to order. She definitely enjoyed the meal and I enjoyed a small sample of it quite a bit.

I didnt even notice the many buckets of free peanuts, or the sign out front warning those who are allergic to them, until we brought some friends for round two at last call! The bar staff remembered us from earlier that night and even let us buy an extra round of specials to down well after closing. They turned nightlife superheroes when I dropped my wallet in the bar,  chasing me down on the street like I robbed the place just to return it.

This is definitely a bar I've been meaning to go back to. Cheap drink specials, good food, good music, friendly staff. It's just too bad about the location, as I personally avoid the plague of obnoxious Granville drunks that fills every one of these bars on the weekend

Judging from prior reviews, this diner seems to have stepped their game up! They must have cut too many corners with the $3 breakfast and realized they couldn't step up to Bon's game, being just around the corner. So instead, they increase the price all week and provide a damn fine diner breakfast at it's simplest and most exquisite.

The wait is long but worthwhile on new years eve, as I witness perfectly plated egg whites and potatoes going every which way and immediately find my appetite, long lost in the hang over abyss. Rock and roll and alternative standards play as background noise.

After being seated in a very crowded section for six, they hold the door right until the last minute for my four friends who were almost too tardy for breakfast. I order bacon and eggs over easy, my date got sausages and sunny side up, rest of the party got some variety of meat and eggs. We played a lot of pass that salt please with our neighbors

Every order, including basted and poached eggs, came out perfectly.  The bacon was crisp but chewy, and the sausages were greasy and flavored perfectly. The hash browns still seem to be of the frozen cubed variety, but perfectly browned and delicious. And all in under 15 minutes.

Overall, awesome food remedy for a not very awesome hang over. Glad they stopped their variety pricing on weekends or I might have had less blessing for grandmother!

Maybe it was because I came here on game night and couldn't care less about how our boys in blue perform on ice, but this place seriously sucked. The food, the service, the noise, everything about it was not something I'm ever keen on trying again.

The waitresses too over 10 minutes to even notice we were there, and only after I grabbed menus from the bar. Then she was incredibly pushy about drinks, asking us if we'd like some overpriced, for a Thursday afternoon, bottle of local swill. Again, this might be the fault of our local heroes on TV, but their selection was priced as where a single beer cost as much as the whole meal. I insisted we wait until our food comes to order a drink, at which point she took the menus and indignantly got us water.

The food is exactly as advertised, everything is exactly $5.95 except for their "Nachos for 2" which is about double. The meals sound appetizing, but the reality of them is absolutely hilarious and somewhat insulting. I ordered their pasta variety, which was described as "Pasta filled with beef and cream cheese and covered in a savory sauce with a side of salad." What, dear reader, could this POSSIBLY be describing but "A slice of Presidents Choice lasagna stuffed in a porcelain cup with two pieces of lettuce covered in basil on the side"?

My date got their chicken wrap, which was more like frozen chicken breast, lettuce, and tomato dethawed in a stiff burrito with a side of two peices of lettuce and three strands of carrot. Both salads were topped with a thick dressing of f balsamic vinegar and canola oil. But hers cost an extra $1.50. Seriously, there were about as many vegetables in it as a fast food burger.

A valid rebuttal to bad diner food is often that it's not some bland burger fast food." But you would be absolutely wrong, because fast food, even ikea, is more nutritious and tasty than this betrayal will ever be.

So we avoided paying for a drink, and if I was feeling more rude I would have stiffed the waitress on her tip as well, instead opting to pay under thanks to some holiday cheer. Seriously, I know this place is cheap, but I personally know "GOOD" cheap from " shit promo to get college kids to blow their trust fund" cheap.

Wait, I just realized something... if their pizza sold by the slice are always old, cold, and full of mold

1) Keep their number
2) Order a 3 topping XL pizza from them as soon as you get on the skytrain to Joyce (only $10.99! Seriously)
3) Pick up pizza fresh at Joyce.
4) ??? Eat?

and then it's actually pretty descent! Lesson learned, just because a pizza HAS slices for sale doesnt mean you should eat them.