Resto Cookies: 10 Fourteen Bar

This is the first post of Resto Cookies, a special category of blog posts on Tough Cookies: Hintonburg Style. As you can probably guess, the focus of Resto Cookies is... restaurants!

Glosette Girl and I try and eat take-out or go to a resturant once a week. It makes things easier in terms of cooking (one less meal to plan) and it gives us something to look forward to every week. If possible, we try something new but we do have a few old favourites.

To-date we've logged all our experiences by hand in notebooks, meaning our comments are just for us. We've probably reviewed a couple of hundred places.

On Resto Cookies I'll share some of our thoughts on local-area (the neighbourhoods of Westboro, Wellington-West, Hintonburg, Chinatown and Little Italy) places, as we try them.

First up: 10 Fourteen Bar.

The context: post-show (Fractus V) drinks.

The good: the ambient level of noise in the bar was great. You can have a conversation and not shout, which wasn't the case with two other places we scoped out before settling on 10 Fourteen. The service was decent and the atmosphere lively and a nice mix of young and old (I'm on the "old" side of that equation these days *sniff*, *sniff*).

The not-so-good: the layout of the bar is odd. I get that's its not a traditional restaurant but it just seems that there isn't enough seating for the space. There are odd gaps. There are also booths, which I find out-of-place in a wine bar.

If it looks cold and miserable its because the first real snow is about to hit

The kicker: living 5 minutes from a bunch of restaurants puts a new perspective on things. You can walk to everything, which is great...except that you know you can walk back just as easily. This raises dilemmas such as, is it really worth it to pay $28 for two glasses of wine when you can have a decent bottle for that price at home? hmmmm. That's not the fault of 10Fourteen, but in this case, we decided to enjoy the comforts of home after a round of drinks. Damn you common sense!