It’s restaurant guide week at NOW with pages and pages of reviews for all your dining needs. There’s also some thematic articles with suggestions for:

• upscale dining
• kid-friendly restaurants
• places with a great view
• barrier-free restaurants
• and places to get lunch under $5

Also in NOW, Graham Duncan interviews Kultura sommelier Kim Cyr, and offers up his LCBO picks for the week.

At Eye, Vernon and Douloff give us an only slightly scathing review of Six Steps:

Like so many Restaurant Makeover recipients we’ve visited, Six Steps has fallen into the same trap by focusing most of the time and effort on the ambiance without much attention given to the menu and its execution. To be fair, you should give this place some time to work out its kinks. But for now, if you want terrific food, walk six steps down and head next door to Colborne Lane.

Ouch. At least now we can stop all the griping about how it’s bloggers and their online reviews that are hurting restaurants. The traditional mainstream print media is doing a fine job of that on their own.

At Metro, Billy Munnelly talks about some nice Chianti (isn’t that right, Clarice?), while Aonghus Kealy answers the question, “How do you like them little green apples?” with “beer!”, as he reviews Best Bitters Brewing’s Green Apple Pilsner and wonders what beers women prefer. Stouts, Aonghus, as dark as the night and as thick as motor oil, preferably laced with chocolate, coffee, oatmeal or a combination of all three.

Also in Metro, there’s a review of Phil’s Original BBQ, a nutritional breakdown of Tim Horton’s Breakfast sandwich (don’t look, or you’ll never be able to eat one again!), and an article on how you should really, really drink your orange juice. Although the expert consulted is an Ottawa dietician, this piece really reads like a press release;

Drinking half of a cup of orange juice gives you the equivalent amount of potassium found in a banana. And it contains less calories.

“You don’t need to eat a banana every day, you can have orange juice instead but it has to be 100 per cent pure,” she [Ottawa registered dietitian Helene Charlebois] says.

Hello… fibre? I bet it wouldn’t take me more than a few mouseclicks to find another medical expert who completely disagrees with Charlebois’ statement. There’s also an article about diabetes, and how good nutrition isn’t enough, and then to taunt the diabetics even more, a piece on how sugar can be part of a healthy diet.

Elsewhere in Metro, there’s a piece about how Yves Veggie Cuisine wants folks to play hoaxes on friends and family this April Fool’s Day by replacing the dead critters on their plates with meat alternatives. Aside from the fact that this is an obvious PR ploy and that Yves, as the highest-selling brand of said meat alternatives in Canada stands to profit from such an effort, this is just a really rude and obnoxious thing to do. All you vegetarians, remember when you first went veg and friends and family kept trying to sneak meat onto your plate? It was hurtful and offensive and really, really assaholic (is TOO a word!), wasn’t it? So don’t be a jerk-off just so Yves can sell some genetically-modified soy.