Casual Dining: Picks

SARAH MUSGRAVE, Gazette Casual-Dining critic 

Casual Dining: Picks


Pierre Obendrauf / The Gazette


(First published on June 13, 2009)

Fair to good bet


1407 St. Marc St. (near Ste. Catherine St. W.)

Phone: 514-758-4665

Website: No

Licensed: No

Credit cards: No

Wheelchair accessible: Yes, but counter seating

Vegetarian friendly: No

Open: Daily noon to 1 a.m.

Price range: Kogos and burgers $2.50-$5.50, sides $2-$3


Still, when we got to this new Asian-inflected downtown diner, I had questions for the counterman. The word kogo sounded too cute to be true. "Well, yeah, in Korea they're just called hot dogs," he said. He also mentioned that his parents run a Korean restaurant on the South Shore; Picks is clearly one for the younger generation.

Frankly speaking, a kogo is your basic wiener on a stick. It gives the all-American corndog a few twists. First, the sausage is coated in flour-based batter rather than cornmeal. Second, it's studded with pieces of french fry, which are apparently stuck in by hand in a time-consuming process. Finally, the whole shebang is deep-fried to resemble a golden armadillo. Given its fat and warty appearance, the first bite came as a relief: it's novelty food, but not so over-the-top weird that it's a turn-off. It tastes like summer on a boardwalk, just not your usual boardwalk on the eastern seaboard.

The sauces at Picks are as colourful as a set of pastel paints. My favourites offered variations on French's flavour; honey-mustard and wasabi mayo were easy matches. Aioli, basic garlic mayo, was a bit of a yawn, but things got more out there with punchy chipotle mayo, chili-spiked ketchup and clumpy sun-dried tomato spread.

It's been a couple of months since the opening, and the ride is still bumpy: order forms have yet to be perfected, drinks seemed like an afterthought, there were only three stools. But somehow this fast-food place won me over. The burger, for instance, was above average. The bun, nicely dusted with flour, had enough substance to absorb moisture without giving up the ghost. The patty was substantial and very peppery, so much so that our chosen toppings of smoked gouda and chipotle mayo were overkill.

A real find was the kimchi burger, which was not even on the menu board. (Busted! We happened to overhear an order.) The addition of hot-and-sour marinated cabbage to beef, lettuce, tomato and onion might have been fancy fusion but came off classic. Like when peanut butter first met chocolate, it made sense.

The steakburger, strips of beef marinated in a sweet soy-based sauce (think bulgogi), had obviously been thought out as another signature dish. For me, it fell somewhere between food court and fantastic. Appealing, but lacking the raw punch of the kimchi burger, which was more slapdash delicious, more natural.

The poutine needed polish. Even customized with mushrooms, grilled red peppers and caramelized onions - when, I asked my date, did the word caramelized become part of the fast food lexicon? - it required more sauce to really jell. Since it was too short a menu not to have each dish shine and too small a space in which to keep secrets, we let management know. "I told you! I told you!" blared an eavesdropping regular, "you gotta put sauce in the middle, too!"

So Picks isn't a well-oiled machine yet but it uses some Asian street smarts to update the greasy spoon.

