Today was Mother’s Day and Captain Jelly Belly and Gal Smiley (with the help of Sir Monkeypants) got me some lovely blue-purple flowers. They made me really happy and I love my little family a whole, whole bunch.
To celebrate, we decided to go to Denny’s for lunch, which is a little family special-occasion tradition. We always go there when friends from Toronto are visiting because there are no Denny’s in Toronto, and when we offer up the Denny’s for dinner everyone always says yes and it’s a matter of half hour at most before I’m face deep in a French Slam with a side order of rye toast.
But when we got there, it was closed! Not closed as in, the owner had a family emergency kind of closed, but closed as in, boarded up, blinds drawn, sign removed. Closed!
Farewell, stacks of pancakes with a lump of butter so big it looks like a scoop of ice cream! So long, huge portions of scrambled eggs that leave me drowsy with protein! Goodbye, oh you delicious hash browns, you! Sunday brunches will never be the same again.
TurtleHead 
Denny’s has become a quasi-tradition for us along with some fellow Canadian expatriates on Thanksgiving. I remember the first time we decided to go there on Thanksgiving and decided to check to make sure they were open. Apparently whoever answered the phone was a bit incredulous — their reply was simply “Ma’am, we never close”. (Actually we’ve found out that’s not quite true, some of them do seem to close on Xmas day.)
For a while the two of us used to go quite regularly on Sunday mornings too — it was just a nice way to enforce a lazy morning. We’d buy the enormous Sunday paper, read it and trade articles while we downed our “slams”. Fortunately we eventually outgrew that; Denny’s breakfasts are hearty, but definitely not that healthy.
I’ve never been crazy about their dinners though — just like Golden Griddle, it’s mostly a place I like to go for breakfast, but rarely dinner. Still, it’s a shame yours is closing — in the U.S. it seems to be even more of an institution. BTW, do you have Taco Bell yet?
I agree about Denny’s dinners — no matter what time of day we were eating there, I always had “breakfast.” Ah, the french toast…yum. It was one of the few places we could take Captain Jelly Belly to dine out, as well, as they had a great kids’ menu. I’ll definitely miss it!
As for Taco Bell, there is one in the Coliseum, the movie theatre that is by that Harvey’s where you were in the holdup that one time. It’s a Taco Bell “express” though, so they don’t have some of the more obscure menu items like Gorditas and the 7-layer Burrito. I think there is now a full-scale Taco Bell downtown somewhere.
Recently a friend of mine told me that the reason that it took so long for The Bell to come to Canada was that in the States, Taco Bell uses Grade D meat, which is not approved for human consumption in Canada. She said that this grade of meat isn’t even approved for store-bought pet foods. So, they had to upgrade their meat scale to open in Canada, but even then, they still use the lowest quality human-approved meat there is. I think this smacks of urban legend, but who knows!
I have also heard about this “Grade D meat” legend for quite a while. So, I did a little digging around and you’re right – it’s totally an urban legend.
Gradely Misteaken
Turns out that a letter based grading system doesn’t even exist! It’s strictly pass or fail.
This is also a rumor, but I heard that Ottawa didn’t have Taco Bell for a long time because someone had purchased the franchise rights for the entire area but wasn’t acting on them because of some property dispute or something. I also seem to remember that there was a transport truck trailer with a Taco Bell logo parked in a parking lot at the northeast corner of Moodie and Robertson for a long time… leading us to believe that a Taco Bell would be installed there soon, but of course it never came.