The Owl’s new lunch menu

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Lunch is the second most important meal of the day. Jaecy Bells

A Bite-Sized Review

The Owl’s new lunch menu just dropped, complete with delightful punny item names, which means it’s time for a student food review. Of course, Marty the staff writer is a natural critic choice. I have all the qualifications: I’ve never done a food review before, I’m Jewish in a city where no one really knows what kosher means, and I subsist entirely on cheap bagels and bubble tea. 

My strategy for covering as much ground as I could in one article was this: eat at the Owl two times, once for an appetizer and once for a full meal. Additionally, because a lot of the menu items were not kosher, I enlisted the help of an omnivore – B– so they could review at least one of those dishes. For vegans, you’ll be happy to know that there is an entire plant-based section of the menu, although I didn’t try anything from it this time 

The first thing I got was the Appetizer Curry Fries, and oh man, what an aroma. It is a yellow curry with pineapple in it, and it was sweet and creamy with mild spiciness, making it an all-around family friendly sauce. The fries themselves were just the right amount of crispy, and dusted with some kind of spice or curry powder I loved. I was extremely satisfied with the portion size and especially the ratio of sauce to fries, which is often botched and results in what I call “sauce anxiety.” All in all, they slap. I was happy to see that these fries are also a side for the regular lunch menu items. Although I can’t eat the other curry items, trying this sauce made me really wish I could. 

As for the Hokey Pokey Bowl, I shouldn’t have gotten a takeout container for it; it’s obviously a bowl food. That being said, the Owl staff were really sweet and arranged the takeout container just like they would a bowl, so I didn’t miss out on the beautiful presentation. The tuna was good, chopped into tasty fish cubes, and the vegetables were super fresh. I enjoyed them even though carrots and sprouts, two of my most hated vegetables, were snuck in there. The whole thing tasted very clean, if you can understand what I mean by that. It’s a meal that I feel like would make you feel better if you had just gotten off of eating burgers every day for a week. The pieces of ginger are also quite big but they’re not too terribly overpowering. I did not enjoy this as much as the curry fries, but I appreciated it nonetheless. The only criticism I have is that the portion size was a little small and the price was a little high. I would recommend getting a side as well, or getting it as a light meal.  

The Caesar salad was predictable, and an appropriate size. The donair was missing some sauce, so… c’mon. Ketchup worked fine in its place, though my mind said “sacrilegious” as I applied it. The meat was nice, the spice was sufficient, the temperature was as it should be. Not like your favorite mom and pop shop would make, but university munchable. Now I’m real full, and not as oily as I could be. 

On a final note, the staff of the Ow,l as always, were really friendly and more than willing to answer questions about what we  were ordering. They also let us in on an exciting development: soon, they will have rotating cheesecake flavours made by one of their chefs, who is apparently specially trained in desserts. We are beyond jazzed to check this out and plan to be going back to the Owl soon to try the items we haven’t yet on our own time. 

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