Digging Up the Dirt on Swiss Chalet

For the third friggin’ year in a row, I have had the unfortunate luck of having to work on the Thanksgiving Holiday. It blows that I work directly with American clients so that I am not really able to enjoy my own national holidays like every other Canadian, and it blows even harder that in return I get to have a forced day off in November as a trade off. Of course, the money is good so I can’t really complain too much.

But that’s not my style, is it?

This year however, things were looking up. This year our corporate powers-that-be, in the true spirit of giving, gave us all complimentary Quarter Chicken dinners delivered straight from Swiss Chalet as a token of their appreciation for our Thanksgiving labors. Awww…isn’t that nice?

It sure beats scooping jellybeans out of a bowl with a plastic fucking spoon anyhow!

In all honesty, it was the best Thanksgiving feast that I can remember in recent years. Not because the chicken was tender and juicy, or that they offered the infamous Swiss Chalet BBQ dipping sauce in an IV drip*, but because I didn’t actually have to go to Swiss Chalet to actually eat it. Actually going to and eating in any Swiss Chalet restaurant is not exactly a happy affair for me. In fact, it’s about as much fun as shoving a prickly pear up your ass.

Simply put, it is my opinion that Swiss Chalet is where old people go to die. It’s literally the ‘Land that Time Forgot’. From the moment you walk through those front doors, all you hear is the gnashing of denture plates and the shuffle of orthopedic rubber soles on linoleum tile. Lets just say that it’s not what I would call a comfortable setting in which to dine. Likewise, after spending only a few minutes in the restaurant lobby, your Olfactory senses begin to depreciate due to the thick stench of Bengay that the majority of the diners have been marinating in for the last quarter century.

I think senior citizens are drawn to Swiss Chalet in the same way that dinosaurs were drawn to tar pits. During the evenings dinner hours, you can atually see a long line of shuffling seniors making their way slowly down the street from their Retirement home with meal vouchers and coupons in hand, like a column of ants raiding a family picnic. In a million years from now, I expect that future archaeologists will find the hunched over remains of hundreds of homosapiens, all miraculous preserved thanks to the greasy chicken preservatives they’ve existed on for the past three decades. Those same future studies will probably also entail detailed migratory patterns for hungry seniors based on the uncovered fossils in direct correlation to the proximity from the ruins of their local Retirement Village.

How in the fuck did the Swiss ever become synonymous with chicken anyways? These are the kind of deep questions I pondered over this holiday as I chewed on my complimentary chicken. What is a Swiss chicken anyways - a neutral, well-prepared foul with a penchant for the correct time?

Chocolate and cheese I can understand maybe. Blonde, buxom, pin-up calender girls - sure. But chicken?!

* Not that I have the right to criticize about their cuisine since I personally consider it a culinary coup-de-tat whenever I just manage to achieve those little plumes of steam whenever I boil spaghetti sauce.