For a small city, Hawkesbury has a lot of restaurants to choose from… most of the fast-food franchises have this market covered — there are two Tim Horton’s, a McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Subway, KFC, A&W, St. Hubert, Amir’s, Thai Express, Dairy Queen, Salvatore’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, as well as a Pizza Pizza. Then there are aboot ten Family owned restaurants as well, as well as a couple of Chip Stands.

Fast food culture is the same all over the world, and it’s no different in Hawkesbury… except, maybe, the fully bilingual nature of the little city, where 87% of people speak French in their homes.

The newest chain restaurant to enter the market is Chuck’s Roadhouse Bar & Grill, which is owned by Obsidian Group Inc. — “a management company formed in 1996 to develop, market, and manage hospitality and real estate interests”. Obsidian is Canadian owned and operated, and also owns Crabby Joe’s, and Coffee Culture Café. Chuck’s moved into, and totally renovated, the same building that Hawkesbury’s Burger King used to occupy on Main Street.

…buying and operated a Chuck’s franchise is not cheap. According to ‘The Franchise Directory’, someone who wants to open a Chuck’s would be asked to pay CDN$50,000 for the franchise fee and an initial investment of $400,000 to $750,000. Boston Pizza, another Canadian-owned restaurant, costs $60,000 for a franchise fee, while Pizza Pizza would be $30,000 — Pizza Pizza is also Canadian owned.

The Hawkesbury version of Chuck’s opened in mid-April, and there have been lineups to get in ever since. Which makes sense, it being shiny and new and all, and considering the amazing amount of free publicity the restaurant received after the closing of the Burger King it has replaced… including in the Carillon, the Tribune-Express, The Review, and BigFM 107.7.

My kids and I are always open to trying new restaurants, and had been trying to get into Chuck’s for supper for a few weeks, until we finally decided that 4pm might give us a better chance of trying out the Roadhouse food selection… and it worked, we avoided the lineup, and had our selection of tables.

The three of us were guided to our seats, handed our oversized menu’s, and that’s when everything pretty much went wrong.

Nothing horrible happened over the next hour, it was all just meh. That was our takeaway… totally meh. Like, completely meh. Never before has something been so meh. The height of mediocrity, that’s how really meh it was. I was in a St. Hubert in Ottawa once, where the “chef’s salad” was some plain lettuce with a single slice of cucumber, and one cherry tomato, and the dressing came in a small packet. Chuck’s wasn’t that bad, but it did remind me of that salad.

First course was a single appetizer for the table, all we wanted was an order of six mozzarella sticks. And that was pretty much what we got… except they were tiny, cold, stale, and obviously either microwaved or deep-fried an hour earlier.

Main course, for the boys was an order of six ‘hot’ chicken wings* and a small rack of ribs, and for me it was a simple Caesar salad with sliced chicken breast. Don’t get me wrong, it all looked good… but, damn, the portions were all so small. Tiny even. If my sons had ordered the same thing from Deja Vu, which is a restaurant just a few blocks down the street — which, like Chuck’s, also has large TV screens that are constantly on sports, we’d have leftovers for lunch and supper the next day.

*…Quintin and Victor do love hot and spicy foods, their favourite snacks usually have “Extreme Spicy” or just plain “Hot” before the food name. So, Quintin, who is 11-years old, ordering the Ghost Pepper wings was not too concerning. Neither was Victor, who is 16-years old, ordering the “Hot” wings. The boys enjoyed the taste of the Ghost Pepper wings, but they both agreed that, based on the Scoville Scale, they were somewhere between pepperoncino and bell pepper… which is about as hot as a bowl of soggy mini-wheats.

My little chicken Caesar salad, which is something I order in restaurants that are new to me, as kind of a test, came in a small bowl that was only half filled with the salad. If I had ordered the same thing from pretty much any other sit-down restaurant in Hawkesbury — except maybe Carole’s, it would have come with soup and actually look and feel like a meal.

For dessert, Victor ordered an ice cream dish, that was actually quite tasty, I had a slice of cheesecake that was a decent size and tasted like it was supposed to, and Quintin abstained because they had no chocolate cake.

Overall, the service was… confusing, to say the least. We had three different wait-staff taking our orders, yet somehow we were ignored by each of them for large periods of time. I asked one of our waitresses for a handful of wetnaps, for example, because Quintin’s hands and face were covered in sauce, and ten minutes later someone else delivered two of them to our table of three.

Final bill for the mediocre service, and the tiny portions, was $129.87 including tip… but I had no idea who I was tipping — which makes Chuck’s one of Hawkesbury’s most expensive restaurants.

So… yeah. I really don’t think Hawkesbury’s family-owned restaurants — Stephanie’s, Goodies, Carole‘s, Le Vieux Chateau, Miss Hawkesbury, Deja Vu, The Giant Pig Smokehouse, L’Escale, Bhandari Indian Cuisine, or the other ones I’m forgetting, have anything to worry about, especially since their portions are generally described as “affordable”, “generous”, and “hearty”.

…the best restaurant in the region is, of course, the Thai Kitchen Restaurant in Hawkesbury, just a few doors down from Chuck’s, where the old Boston Café / Dong Kong Café used to be. The cost is a about the same as Chuck’s, but the portions are good and the food is vastly superior to anything else between Ottawa, Montreal, and Cornwall. Be happy, go there.