Deacons Corner serves up trucker-style meals that are satisfying, filling and likely to expand your waist size
Mia Stainsby
Sun
Chef Patchen Gallagher and the all-day breakfast at Deacon’s Corner Gastown Diner. Photograph by: Ian Lindsay, Vancouver Sun
DEACON’S CORNER
101 Main St., 604-684-1555.
Open 7 to 3, Monday to Friday; 10 to 3 on weekends.
www.deaconscorner.ca
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When I dropped into Deacons Corner one weekend morning, it was sartorial convergence. Every person, to a knee, wore jeans. Tight jeans, droopy jeans, jaunty jeans, mom jeans, low-rise jeans, the works. It’s the universal language of casual, I suppose, and casual you want to be at the corner of Main and Alexander.
When I saw my hefty plate o’ food I panicked about my skinny jeans, and can tell you I did not depart very sveltely with my newly acquired muffin-top waist. I walked beyond the overpass to Crab Park to sit and rest on a grassy knoll.
But skinny jeans do not concern chef Patchen Gallagher. (He’s named after American poet Kenneth Patchen, who, like e.e. Cummings, used words so deliciously.) He makes big honkin‘ breakfasts.
Deacon’s Corner is open for Bunyanesque breakfasts, brunches and lunches. I try not to mention the recession, but here I go again: Deacon’s does have recessionary appeal with its friendly prices (an average $6 to $10 for breakfasts and lunches, fully loaded) and a throwback feel of roadside diners of the ’50s and ’60s. And how perfect is this? Corner Gas star Brent Butt has been in a few times. Now that the sitcom has wrapped, why not Deacon’s Corner, Brent?
Deacon’s Corner even has a Prairie connection — it takes its name from a Saskatchewan cafe run by the grandfather of one of the owners. (Deacon’s owners are the trio from Cobre, the nuevo Latin restaurant in Gastown.) Gallagher’s “crowning achievement,” he says, is the BLT with house-made bacon patties, more bacon belted around the patties (for a crunch) — six rashers in all, besides the L. and T. The breads are all from Swiss Bakery and of good quality.
The menu includes many permutations of bacon/sausa-ge/eggs/omelettes. The Hungry Man comes with a six-ounce sirloin steak, three eggs, hashbrowns and toast — for $13.50. There are pancakes and there’s French toast. I order French toast and find out later from Gallagher that I consumed half a loaf of challah-like bread. “A loaf is eight inches — two orders,” he says. (I revise: It was a challah-top spilling over my jeans, not muffin.)
A warning: His pancakes use three cups of batter. My partner’s Mexican scrambled omelette threatened to drop off the side of the plate. The lunch-y dishes stick to your ribs — meatloaf (“we grind our own meat, pork and beef, with onions ground right into it,” says Gallagher); pulled pork sandwich, Reuben, chicken fried steak, burgers, chili, mac ‘n’ cheese. Some of the dishes pull you down to the southern U.S. — the country gravy has southerners coming back time and again. It’s got bacon fat, onions, sausage, chicken stock and cream. “Best compliment I got was from a guy from down south whose grandmother passed away. After he had our biscuits and gravy, he said whenever he wants to visit his grandma, he can come here,” says Gallagher. “The food has resonance.”
He adds: “No one leaves feeling sick. One guy ordered a burger topped with chili and fried eggs for nine days straight before he finally broke.”
Restaurant visits are conducted anonymously and interviews are done by phone.
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