Canada Trip.co.uk

OK! time for another foody article. On the rounds of all the main eateries of southern Ontario we came upon Arby’s. This on the face of it to be honest kind of looks like a burger place, but it isn’t! Like I’ve said, the majority of all these restaurant chains have a unique factor which sets them apart from the rest, at Arby’s its the actual products they sell. Arby’s actually are famous for their roast beef sandwiches!

Now, the photo above is certainly not one of my favourite photos.. it was taken on the move so i’ll apologise for that! However, my trip to Arby’s was actually in fairly high expectation. I’d heard their roast beef in their sandwiches was so tender.. Given the recommendations i was thinking i was in for a pretty decent treat. And besides – I was in Canada, and along with the US, Spain and Australia, it’s a beef loving country – with good cause due to the quality of their beef.

We parked up outside the adjacent Tim Horton’s and went inside. Its interior was the usual comfy fast food restaurant feel, similar to most burger kings in the UK. Immediately i was a little surprised. I had kind of expected the sandwiches to have really nice thick pieces of roast beef in them, but from what i could see in the pictures was more of a very thinly sliced .. wafer thin in fact – beef on a burger bun. I quickly put that to the back of my mind though – it doesn’t matter how the meat is cut right? providing you have enough of it on the sandwich!

Well – we all know from McDonald’s in the UK that we should never trust the pictures on the menu, but i was thinking – this is Canada, half hearted doesn’t exist!
We decided to have just the Beef ‘n’ Cheddar sandwich, though not the Combo, as really we were hoping to just try their signature beef sandwich. Fries are fries ultimately in Canada, it doesn’t matter where you go – you wont be disappointed in them, and though the Curly Fries here at Arby’s are one of the things they are well known for, i would be surprised if they were any better than the particularly high standards that all Canadian fast food restaurants set across the board!

This is actually a pretty difficult review for me because as much as i want to give places the benefit of the doubt, Arby’s was truly a big disappointment.. For someone who was expecting to have thick pieces of nice roast beef on a nice big breadcake, the size of the sandwich was a little bit of a let down.. To be fair though, the bun was very good quality, nice and soft and it was onion topped so it gave it a nice complimentary flavour to the beef. As well as the bun the sandwich came with what i think was squeezy cheese, rather than real cheese – so the quality was the usual processed cheese flavour, pretty strong, but with an almost chemically side to it .. What was nice though was the tomato-y sauce that was on the sandwich, this did work really well. It was sweet and subtle – so it didnt overpower the meat or the cheese on the sandwich, which a lot of sauces tend to do.

So .. now we come to the beef. This is Arby’s signature beef, the meat which it’s business is about.. and i honestly was disappointed greatly by it.. The meat, whether it is cut from a real joint of beef, or actually taken from a reformed beef-roll which they cook on site, just simply did not taste as much as it should have.. The flavour was so subtle the cheese covered it up almost completely… The concept was also a little odd to me. This was what we’d call in the UK – Sandwich ham style beef. You know the stuff you can get in Sainsburys or Morrisons, pre-packed wafer thin sandwich beef, but it was warm, on a sandwich. The beef at Arby’s is actually just as good as the Morrisons Sandwich beef..

Still, Arby’s is not bad. I’ll stress that. You get a nice sandwich, it’s filling and you get the usual quality you’ll expect from anywhere which serves food in Canada, but for me, there’s nothing truly special, nothing that sets it high up there as somewhere you’d decide above other places to go for lunch.. Unless of coarse you wanted to try its Jacket Potatoes, wedges or loaded potato skins, or even their ham sandwiches. My problem ultimately was that i went in with expectations that were far too high.. Maybe i’ll call in again in october to try it out again!

I’d love to hear from people – to tell me what you think about Arby’s – what your favourite things are, whether you agree or disagree with what I’ve said, and I’m looking for people from Canada, the US and especially people from the UK who have tried Arbys after knowing what we can get in the UK supermarkets.

So to sum it up, Arby’s – its not my first choice for lunch, it’s a sandwich shop at heart, serving warm sandwich beef sandwiches. Why not give it a try and let me know what you think!

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 9:10 am and is filed under Places to Eat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.