Smoke's Poutinerie Guelph (Cork) — Restaurant in Guelph

Smoke's Poutine is not only to be eaten at 3:00am with 4 of your closest friends, a lively crowd of inebriated strangers and a few stumbling freshman in the dead of midterm season. But rather, it is a place of comfort and gluttony for all of us alike. The lines may be long and the employees may be severely understaffed, but the generous lump of curds and gravy is well worth the wait. The availability of a tip option on the debit machine gives me my daily dose of ironic humour, as if to suggest that any individual dining at this establishment, frequented most commonly by students of the financially challenged variety, would have the means of purchasing 'drunk food' while also leaving behind a gratuity of any kind.

In all seriousness, my only negative experiences at this particular location have been related to long wait times due to there being only one employee on duty. I don't tend to visit the restaurant during busy hours of the evening as to avoid the high volume of customer traffic that tends to occur Thursday through Friday, but have still had to wait a considerable amount of time before receiving my food.

During my most recent disappointment at Smoke's, I arrived one hour before the restaurant was closing to order my usual favourite, Pulled Pork Poutine, but was told that only the Classic Poutine was able to be sold during the last hour of operation. I have never had this happen to me before and was a little surprised to hear of...

Good evening head office - Do you know that the Guelph location has bi-monthly raves that blast loud music until 2 in the morning? I'm a neighbor & when it happened the first time during the summer of '24, I respectfully visited them the next day and asked the owner/manager to simply give me some notice so that I could either join in the fun or leave town for the night. After all, who am I to stop a good party. Fast forward. It's now the evening of January 24th and again for the third time, the owner/manager/whomever has not provided me the common courtesy of a heads-up phone call in advance. I try and support this franchisee by purchasing one of their poutines every 2 weeks, which imo, is of very poor value. Value is the quality of an item based on the cost. In this case, overpriced, pre-packaged, garbage! It's unfortunate that this location does not understand what it means to be a good community neighbor. My questions to you, Mr. Cunningham, as the franchisor, what is your vetting process? Is there a vetting process, or do you just accept anyone with stupid amounts of money to hand over ($300k - $500k) to your corporation? And, do you have guidelines as to what a franchisee can do under YOUR banner? Oh wait, here comes the City of Guelph...

Really poor experience! Started with being over-charged, and then short changed ... followed by having the poutine dumped upside down from one box to another (so all the toppings ended up on the bottom), and when questioning about it, was told "who cares, people mix it up anyway" and then tossed a box on the counter for me to flip it back up myself. After staring at him in disbelief, he seemed quite disgruntled as he dumped it back upright into a new box (3rd box) with toppings such as guacamole being left behind and lost with each transfer. When I told him some people care about presentation and not wanting their toppings on the bottom of the box as opposed to on top of their fries, he simply argued back that "actually, no one cares". Probably the rudest, laziest service I've experienced... and this was while introducing poutine to my Thai fiancee - her first time ever seeing and trying poutine... nice way to ruin a generally enjoyable Canadian experience. Loyal customer (of other...