Lunch Tuesday: Kathy’s Corner

I’m inordinately pleased that the owners avoided being cute and spelled Corner correctly. If the restaurant was called Kathy’s Korner, it would be difficult to take it seriously.

However, there’s no Kathy. At least, not any more.

The 10-year-old deli has been owned by Kevin and Vesna Singh since they bought it from a Greek couple three years ago.

The menu remains the same.

“It’s always been exactly the same food: it’s rotisserie chicken,” Kevin Singh said in a phone interview.

“We give a chicken leg dinner for $5.65. You get salad, rice, potato, chicken leg – there’s nowhere else in downtown Toronto, or anywhere in Toronto probably, where you can get a good meal like that for that price. That’s our main thing,” he said.

The chicken is salty and brown and delicious. Remember that episode of Friends where Joey says the other friends can have his chicken, because he’s just going to eat the skins? The chicken skin at Kathy’s Corner (139 Dundas St. E.) is that good.

The sides do not live up to the main: the rice is overcooked and the sliced potatoes are flavourless. The salad – your choice of Caesar or Greek – is mixed at the counter and covered in a squirt of unlabelled dressing.

There’s also a lunch option, which is just chicken and salad.

“It’s not a big profit per order, but hopefully, with our customers that come through everyday, that’s how we tend to survive,” said Singh.

“We get a lot of police officers, we get a lot of fire people, Ryerson students, cab drivers…it’s a steady mix.”

This was our last week at Yonge and Dundas for Lunch Tuesday. Thanks to Jennifer Ng and Artem Pashkevich for suggesting I hit up Kathy’s Corner – despite living and working in the area for much of the past eight years, I’d never tried it.

Next month, I’ll be eating at York Mills and Don Mills. Pranavan Gnanaganeshan has suggested Pizza By The Slice, where there is something called the Mexican Nacho pizza. I cannot resist.

Where do you eat at York Mills and Don Mills?