North Border Bar and Grill

This place was a bit out of the way (2 Rochester Park off North Buona Vista Road, 6777-6818) but sounded promising in that it served food from the American Southwest using a range of appropriate chili peppers for seasoning, including jalapeno, chipotle, and of course, habanero. We got started with a sampler platter of their starters, which included a chimichanga, jalapeno poppers, and buffalo wings. Unfortunately, all three of these were a letdown, with the chimichanga being cold, the jalapeno poppers being oddly stuffed with an herb (and unmelted) cream cheese, and the buffalo wings being so meaty that I literally ate them with a knife and fork. The "jackass" buffalo wing sauce that we requested (the middle on a scale of three) was sweet, thus providing another turnoff for me. The salsa and guacamole were not very fresh, and the corn bread was so excessively moist that we barely took two bites.

Still, I didn't regret coming here. In fact, there were a number of things here that did turn out really well, such as the side of refried beans, which really got me excited due to the richness of bacon worked into it. The oil in the Crazy Pasta excelled at extracting the aroma out of the garlic browning process, even if this was really just aglio olio rather than anything from the American Southwest. And since we're on the subject of strange ice cream flavors, we finished this off with the Habanero Ice Cream, which impressively captured that distinct scent of the habanero pepper, as well as a surprising amount of bite afterwards. Nice one.

If I come back, I'm definitely ordering the latter items rather than the former. Moreover, it's nice to see a little gift shop on the side selling all sorts of hot sauces from the US. I'll be sure to take a note of that whenever we need to stock up on more.