Earlier today I wrapped up a business meeting in the small town of Leamington, Ontario, a little place in farm country about forty minutes southeast of Windsor and Detroit. It was 11:30 AM and I figured I’d get something small to eat for the long drive home.
I stopped at a Tim Hortons in the middle of town, and saw they are selling little sandwiches called “Craveables.” They’re not big, and I wasn’t that hungry. Perfect, I thought, and I ordered one and a coffee. Money was exchanged, and I received my items and drove off.
I took one bite of my sandwich and was quite literally amazed. It was as dry and as tasteless as cardboard, or as if I had tried biting into a blanket. I examined the sandwich, rotated it as you do to find part that might be a tastier bite, and tried again. It was equally vile. I put the sandwich down and ate not a morsel more.
The Tim Horton’s Craveable Crispy Chicken Sandwich consisted of only four ingredients.
THE BUN. The bun was a dense I-guess-it’s-technically-white-bread thing that had all the moistness of granite.
THE CHICKEN. The “Crispy” chicken patty was not a patty at all, but basically two small chicken tenders that had been laid side by side. The chicken was cooked at least twice as long as it should have been; composed of perhaps two ounces of chicken in total. It had the consistency and flavour of a running shoe.
THE LETTUCE. The only trimming on the sandwich was one (1) piece of lettuce. It was wilted and browning in parts. It might well have been from the first head of lettuce ever farmed.
The “SAUCE.” I put quotation marks around the word “sauce” because a sauce is technically supposed to add some sort of flavour to the food it is served with. This sauce did not. I don’t mean it added a bad or unpleasant flavour; I mean it had no flavour at all. None. It had the appearance of a hot aioli, but was as tasteless as water. It was like art paste.
My feelings were genuinely hurt. I am appalled that human beings would prepare, serve, and actually accept money in exchange for the utterly disgusting thing in the wrapper.
“Craveable”: 1. adj. something capable of being craved. 2. adj: cringeworthy advertising puffery. 3. adj: A horridly mislabeled sugar, flour, and grease mixture invented by Tim Horton’s evil twin’s test kitchen and motor pool.
I’ve never really been successful at ordering food at Tim Horton’s outside of coffee and donuts. Not sure if that’s because I’m in the U.S. I remember having a very difficult time getting them to make me a breakfast sandwich that they advertised and had big signs and posters for, like it was some exotic thing. But my kids loved the donuts and Timbits.
This post did make me curious. So I decided to look up their menu, only to find that their website will not even allow me to see a menu unless a location near me is open at the time. I selected my local place, to see they are only open until 5pm. Crazy thing is, one of the features when I moved here was that Tim’s was open 24/7 and one of the few places. They cut back to 10-11pm at most locations even pre-COVID, but 5pm wow. OT: but my area went from four 24/7 grocery stores to 0 and I can’t think of any 24/7 fast food places anymore. Same for pharmacies (CVS went from 24/7 to 9am-8pm). IHOP is open 24 hrs sometimes but not always. Waffle House is spotty or only does take out. Steak n Shake, White Castle, McDonalds, Tim Horton all used to be. I don’t really eat fast food anymore, but I’m surprised so many places have “banker hours” or seem like relics from some small towns in the old days.
Your mistake was in considering Tim Horton’s to be a place to pick up lunch. I don’t want to be that “I told you so” guy, especially because I never actually told you so, but I will say that nothing about this surprises me. I don’t even like Timmy’s coffee, and that’s their main raison d’être. The lineups I see at Timmy’s drivethroughs are as inexplicable to me as the ones at McDonald’s. Actually more so – during breakfast hours, McDonald’s at least has good coffee and a decent bacon and egg McMuffin; Timmy’s has neither.
The success of Tim Horton’s and its existence as some kind of alleged Canadian icon has always been a mystery to me. The best I can say for them is that if you can tolerate their coffee – and sometimes I’ve had to, due to lack of better choice – on a good day you might be able to pick up a semi-decent donut. Maybe.
ETA: As someone who makes great chicken sandwiches at home, this is something that’s hard to screw up given a few basic ingredients starting with a good grilled marinated chicken breast or a crispy fried one, then a leaf or two of romaine lettuce, bacon, tomato, and mayo on a toasted bun.
I went up to Canada last summer and did end up at a Tims for a donut and coffee because somebody in the car needed a restroom.
I failed to see the appeal. I’ve had better donuts from Kroger and the best thing I could say about the coffee is it was hot. I don’t think McDonald’s coffee is especially great, but it’s perfectly fine and better than a lot of places. Certainly better than whatever that was.
I figured it must just have been a particularly bad example of a Tim Horton’s, but maybe not.
The OP made one mistake. The mistake he made was not driving 1000 miles south to a Publix grocery store and ordering a Chicken Tender Pub-Sub. Theyare simply sublime.
Everything I know about Tim Horton’s I’ve learned from reading. Never been to one. Most of my limited time spent in Canada has been in downtown Montreal 20
= years ago where/when they seemed to be absent.
Perhaps this is a situation where back in the 1960s Horton’s was actually a good small-ish chain of decent if basic all-hours coffee/donut joints. But slowly over the decades they’ve grown too big, en-cheapified too much, and tried to brand-extend farther than their store equipment, company- and franchisee- culture, and most importantly hiring practices, can sustain?
In short, perhaps the legend has only grown over time, while their ability to live up to that legend has been actively shrunk by cumulative management action.
And by all their competitors slowly upping their game. Which cumulatively ups the customers’ expectations.
I imagine that if a typical US or Canadian urban / suburban dweller were teleported into 1965 they’d find all sorts of food and beverage outlets to be unremittingly dreary. From coffee & donut joints to high-end steak houses it’d all seem bland & scruffy. And most of the variety of foods we take for granted simply wouldn’t be available. Whether that’s decent lettuce in February, or even crappy Americanized forms of Chinese food anywhere.
I know one can simulate this teleporting pretty easily by visiting most any rural small town main street and sampling the food and groceries on offer. Dreary seems the best word for it.
I will also cite this almost-current thread along a similar line:
Lots of places from our youth have legends that now exceed their reality. But as long as management can keep puffing the puffery, a new generation of aficionados can be made to queue up in their cars for crap.
I believe that Tim Horton’s was the place that some years ago changed from baking fresh donuts in-store to getting some sort of mass-produced frozen crap delivered, and that this was associated with a significant drop in quality. Which certainly supports your theory. Add in a bunch of other similar cheapification, and there you are.
The craze for fast-food chicken sandwiches has gotten to the point where just about every franchise outlet has to get in on the act. It’s worse than when “Tuscan” was a super lifestyle buzz-word.
I learned long ago (from the outlet in our hospital*) not to get anything at Tim Horton’s except for the occasional coffee and donut/pastry.
ISTM the real consumer attraction of the various fast food chicken sandwiches isn’t the chicken. It’s the deep-fried sugar-filled breading they use.
And of course from the business perspective, sugar and flour are cheaper than even cheap processed chicken. And in addition to adding bulk and crunch, the former helps to hide the non-flavor of the latter.
Which leads to my horrific conclusion. To wit:
The breaded and deep-fried ground beef hamburger is being feverishly worked on in factory kitchens all across North America. Once they perfect it, it’ll be in fast food outlets everywhere. For particularly nasty values of “perfect”.
The number of Tim’s locations has just exploded in the last twenty years or so. When I was a kid growing up in Kingston, Ontario, there were four Tim Hortons in town; I know that because one of my best friends worked for them and would drive donuts from the main store to the others, sometimes in his car, which consequently always smelled like donuts.
I just looked it up and now Kingston has nineteen Tim locations despite the city’s growth being nowhere near that in terms of population. It’s gone from about 100,000 to 140,000 or so. The city now has a Tim’s for about every 7,000 residents.
You hardly ever see a Tim Horton’s (note: it’s officially styled Tim Hortons, but I absolutely refuse to type it that way) die, so clearly this incredible expansion of franchise opportunities was commercially justified. I can’t blame the people involved from trying to make a buck.
No belief needed; it’s fact. My buddy in high school had to deliver donuts BECAUSE they were being made fresh in the one location (the downtown location on Ontario Street, I think) that had the physical resources to do that, while the others did not. This system obviously makes sense if you have a number of locations in a reasonably short drive from one another; the equipment to make pastries costs a lot of money, the space to put it in costs more money, etc etc. They abandoned that system a very long time ago.
I would assume there was some similar thought process behind the sudden decision about 10-15 years ago to replace normal fries with “Crispy fries,” which in literally not a single case improved the fry. McDonald’s has so far resisted this.
I’ve only had the Poutine from Tim Hortons. It was a store off of a highway where there weren’t a lot of other stores. There were two HS kids behind the counter; a third was wiping down the tables. We were the only customers in the place ( and it had that vibe where I almost expected to see the kid at the register tapping his watch to get us out of there so he could close up and go home to dinner early).
The fries were like Alex Jones: fat, limp, and greasy. The gravy poured on top formed a skin on top before I could walk it back to the table. Honestly, as bad as you say it is, I now wish that I’d ordered the chicken sandwich.