Cherry Street Bar-B-Que — Restaurant in Toronto

DISAPPOINTING Peak Toronto experience. Arrived just before 7pm on a Saturday. Zero signage directing us, nor employees stationed anywhere near the entrance to guide us. Are we supposed to line up at the patio? Nope. Check in at the hostess station inside the restaurant? There isn't one. Completely disorganized right off the bat. Turns out you are somehow just supposed to intuitively know that you first line up just to place your order, then you're given a number and you go seat yourself and your food & drinks will be brought out to you. Should've had the dignity and wherewithal to have left right away, but of course we stood in line like the Toronto chumps we are for 30-40 minutes. Had an awfully long time to deliberate what we were going to order, and since at this point we were famished, we were very excited to get the Large Platter. Nothing doing. As soon as it was our turn to place our order, the guy at the counter announces they are out of baby back ribs, spare ribs, beef ribs (the Saturday special no less) and brisket - i.e. basically the only things you'd even really want at a BBQ place. Your choices are pretty much sausage, chicken or turkey at this point, whoop-de-doo. With the platter now off the menu, we are only able to order sandwiches. Find ourselves a table on the patio. Drinks come out shortly thereafter. I don't recommend the peach lemonade; it was just sour peach juice. And the raspberry negroni is stiff but has no raspberry in it nor is it a negroni. A full half hour later our appetizer and mains come out at the same time. Appetizer is the chips & queso, and the queso is supposed to be layered but it's more like it has a dollop of chunky salsa, a few kernels of corn, and instead of refried beans it contains LITERALLY ONE pinto bean and ONE red kidney bean. Decent amount of meat on our sandwiches but that doesn't matter because it is cold, dry and flavourless; only the buns are lightly grilled. I had wanted brisket beans as one of my sides, which of course they were out of, so they subbed it for the vegetarian beans which was more like chili and contained chickpeas?? They forgot to bring me my cornbread, so I had to flag someone down. So just be sure you verify what they bring out vs. what you ordered. The cornbread "muffin" is, by the way, smaller than a two-bite brownie. Once we were done I had to once again flag a server down to bring my banana puddin', although at least with a refrigerated dessert I understand why that wasn't brought out with the appetizers & mains. According to their photos, this pudding was to be served in a small glass mason jar, but instead all 2.5 tablespoons of it came in the kind of plastic container you expect condiments to come in when you order take out. Anyway, moral of the story really is SHAME ON ME for even putting up with any of this and now having the gumption to complain about a situation I knew better to avoid altogether. However, I'll still post this as a cautionary tale for anyone who...

Extremely disappointing experience at the Queen’s Crossing pop up. I think I owe the actual store location a visit to do them justice, but this pop up is not it. Oh boy where do I even start. Let’s talk about the food. I ordered the sampler platter with spareribs, brisket, and sausage. I can tell that the Smokey flavor is there, but the food served is lukewarm at best, which really destroys the bbq experience. The brisket is on the fattier side, so the coldness of it really didn’t help with balancing out the flavor. I had to eat it with an insane amount of pickles to not waste my food. The ribs is mediocre, and had a similar issue as the brisket - fatty and cold. The sausage is probably the driest sausage I’ve had in ages. It’s salty but extremely dry, leaving an almost grainy texture in my mouth. My friend ordered a brisket sandwich with baked beans and Mac and cheese. The sandwich, according to him, was mediocre at best. The Mac and cheese, which I tasted, feels like throwing boiled pasta into the cheese sauce and calling it again. There was very minimum seasoning, and the pasta was definitely not cooked in salted water (which, btw, is such a common issue I’ve encountered at restaurants lately. Like what happened to the good old salting your pasta water? I’m I not following the latest culinary trend or something?) Finally, the service was so so so off putting. The two workers there were probably the slowest moving food handlers I’ve ever seen. The image of them slowly retrieving the meat from the fridge, slowly unwrapping the plastic in an extremely inefficient manners that makes people worried about flying plastic wrap pieces, slowly slicing into cold meat and slowly reheating them - really isn’t that appetizing at all. What really concerns me is the hygiene. One of the food handlers had really long beard and hair. But wasn’t wearing a beard net or hair net at all. I honestly cannot find a better word than “off putting.” Of course I still ate my food cuz I had to pay over 30 dollars for my platter and a Diet Coke, but I would not recommend coming to the pop up. Maybe I’ll pay a visit to the actual store after I recover from this incident, because I refuse to believe the #1 bbq spot Toronto raves about is this insanely mediocre. But until then, avoid the pop up like a...

I've been here twice.

I've tried the brisket, pulled pork, turkey, sausage and ribs as well as some of the sides.

I enjoyed all of the meats except for the brisket. Although, I've never had brisket before so maybe it's just not for me.

My favorite would be the sausage, perfect taste and texture. Eating it with the fresh jalapenos and coleslaw was AAAAmazin'!

The sides are delicious, but beware the "small sides" that come with some of the meals which are insultingly small, even bite-sized would be an exaggeration. If you want to try the cornbread pay for it separately (get the loaf), which is delicious by the way. Mac and cheese is also good.

I actually chose this location because I saw banana pudding on their menu that I was very excited to try. The first time I went they were out of it, but called ahead on my second time to make sure they had some.

I was actually quite disappointed by the banana pudding. It's $8 and it says online it comes in a jar, but again there seems to be an issue with the portion sizes here, because a jar would be stretching it, shot glass would be more accurate.

Also, the pudding was not what I expected. It wasn't bad, but it didn't strike me texture or taste wise as a pudding, more like some sort of unique desert. It didn't smell much or taste much like bananas, although it was interesting. I would not recommend it. I think I would have rather eaten some premade cheap banana pudding with real whipped cream and crumble on top, in an actual jar, I would have enjoyed that better.

Overall this place has great food and I would go there again, the criticisms I have are minor.

In terms of service, it's quite passive. No one said a word to me the entire time, which I'm sure many would like. If they did ask me how the food was, I would have politely critiqued the pudding, which I doubt they wanted to...