where jess ate

When the Bohemian Gastropub first opened, I was really excited to try it. But that excitement didn’t last very long…

Right from the get-go, our experience wasn’t off to a great start. My friend, Chris got there about five minutes before I arrived. He texted me saying it wasn’t too busy and that he’d grab a seat first. So I was surprised to see him still standing by the entrance when I arrived five minutes later. We stood there dumbly for a few more minutes and still, nobody came to greet us. So finally, Chris aproached the bartender asking if we should seat ourselves and he gave us a look as if to say “duh” and said yes impatiently. Okay, then…

The restaurant is actually a lot bigger than it looks from the outside. What you can see from the outside is only about half of its space as the restaurant is divided in half by the bar in the middle of the restaurant. Since the front of the restaurant was quite busy, Chris and I opted to sit in the back.

We started with the Four Spiced Confit Chicken Wings – with house made bbq sauce ($12). The appetizer came with eight tiny wings. Given how small they were, we were afraid they’d be on the dry side, but they were nice and moist. I also enjoyed the bbq sauce the wings came with but I wished they had actually coated the wings in the sauce instead of leaving a small pool of it on the bottom of the plate which made it difficult to dip the wings in. The small side of fries that the wings came with was a nice surprise. The fries were perfectly crisp and seasoned.

Chris and I ordered two mains to share. The first thing I tried was the Braised Lamb Shank – roasted winter vegetables and braised white beans, natural jus ($14). Chris and I were debating between the ribs and the lamb shank, so we asked the server to make a recommendation and he suggested the lamb. After tasting the lamb, I would hate to see what the ribs taste like…

As much as I like lamb, this lamb shank was incredibly bland and wasn’t as tender as I would have liked. It really needed some sort of sauce or some seasoning. The menu indicated that the dish came with a natural jus. It certainly tasted like it was cooked au naturel, as though they took it straight from the butcher and cooked it without doing anything to it. Maybe some sort of sauce would have helped.

The sweet potatoes and parsnips the lamb shank was served with were also unremarkable. All around, just a very disappointing dish.  

The second entrée we shared was the House Made Currywurst Sausage – Grandma Boehmer’s mango chutney, pain au lait ($10). The sausage itself tasted decent, but if you’re looking for a good sausage, I recommend going to Wvrst instead. Sadly, we found the rest of the dish to be less than decent. The bun tasted a tad stale as it was a little hard and crumbly (is this how “pain au lait” is supposed to be?). As for the mango chutney, it tasted fine on its own, but the combination of it with the sausage just wasn’t working for me.

As the sausage was under the “sandwiches” section of the menu, we had a choice of baby greens or fries. Since we didn’t know our wings came with fries, we requested fries for this dish. Having enjoyed the fries with our appetizer so much, we were both looking forward to another serving of these addictive fries. Unfortunately this batch wasn’t quite as good this time around. They weren’t as crispy and could have used a bit more time in the fryer.

Overall, I didn’t have a great experience here. The service was really slow and inattentive (but it seemed like they were understaffed). The space was dim and quite intimate… at least for the first half of our meal. Midway through our meal, the music suddenly got incredibly loud. Not so intimate! And the food? For the most part, it wasn’t very enjoyable. If you’re coming here, I’d recommend just sticking to the drinks.

At a glance:
• Unremarkable food; I’d stick to the drinks
• Slow service, felt ignored
• Located on Queen between Spadina & Bathurst

Ratings (out of 5):
• Food: 1 stars
• Service: 2 stars
• Atmosphere: 3 stars