Mo's Family Restaurant (Oakville)

Mo's Family Restaurant
Tel: 905-844-7485
467 Speers Rd.
Oakville, ON
(on the north side of Speers between Fourth Line and Dorval)

I decided to give this rather tired looking eatery on Speers Rd.  a try because it was rated well on urbanspoon.com. I’m kind of obsessed with web reviews. We were looking for a place to take two of the three kids for dinner on a Saturday night, so we didn’t want it too busy and it had to be kid friendly. With a moniker of “Mo’s Family Restaurant,” we thought it would fit the bill. And we weren’t wrong.

Mo’s has seating for about a hundred people, and there were probably thirty there. The decor isn’t too inspiring, but then, it doesn’t really have to be. If the food is good. Well...the menu is HUGE. I’m always sceptical of massive menus because how can they possibly have all these ingredients fresh?

Basically, they have everything on the menu you might want in this type of restaurant: burgers, sandwiches, steak, souvlaki...it looked promising. They had a decent kids’ menu, too, with the usual fair of pasta, grilled cheese, burgers, etc.

My ten-year-old son and I each ordered a burger from the adult’s menu, he with poutine, me with Greek salad. My husband ordered some kind of fried chicken Panini.

The verdict? The food was pretty good. Not great, not bad. The paddies were homemade, which is really important to me. Nothing worse than a frozen, prefab burger IMO. Well, maybe some things are worse, like war and all that really sad stuff you see on the news, but in terms of fast food fare, fresh burgers rate highly.

My problem was the portion sizes. Enormous. Ridiculously big. Seriously. No one could eat portions this big. Luckily, we didn’t order my three-year-old anything, she was just going to pick off of our plates. Three meals, no apps, no dessert, four people: we left enough on our plates to feed us all again...and then some. And basically I left feeling sick. This, I can’t understand. I guess it’s a whole “value for your money” thing, but I’d rather have reasonable portions of better food. Like I said, the food wasn’t bad, but they could have done better.

The server we had was great. She actually recommended not ordering extra fries because “the portions are pretty big. Save your money.” And she was sweet enough to list my son’s burger on the bill as a kids’ meal, so that saved us $5. It could not possibly have been a kids’ portion. Maybe a 300 lb. football player’s portion.

Anyhow, basically Mo’s Family Restaurant had decent food, good service and was quite kid-friendly. The only thing that would keep me away is those gargantuan portions. Why, you ask, wouldn’t you just take it home as a doggie bag or don’t eat it all? I can’t. That’s right, I can’t. There’s food in front of me – especially fries with gravy and cheese curds – and I must eat it. No matter how sick and full I’m feeling. Sad, I know. But that’s the way I roll. After after stuffing myself to capacity, there’s no way I want to take home the leftovers to have to look at them again.