Located at 719 College Street in Toronto

By the name of this restaurant, Hey Meatball, you already know what they specialize in and that it’s clearly not a restaurant for you to go to if you are a vegan or vegetarian!  (However, what’s interesting is that they actually do serve vegan balls and they actually use sustainable local ingredients that are only from a 100-mile radius.  Pretty cool!)  

Charlotte arranged for Tracy’s birthday to be held at this establishment here in Little Italy this year.  Unfortunately, this restaurant is more of a sit-down and eat casually or take-out restaurant than a full service restaurant so that meant that they didn’t take reservations.

Hey Meatball!

It is a small shop on the corner of College and Crawford.  It is super casual.  You order at the counter, wait for your food to be called, and then when you are done your meal, you take your plates, cutlery, and self-served water glasses to the side to be washed by the kitchen later.

The menu was on a chalkboard in front of the ordering counter.  I had briefly skimmed online reviews that mentioned the Rodfather was a good choice, so even though I wasn’t in a big mood for sandwiches, I ordered the Rodfather to try.

This handwritten chalkboard gives such a homey touch to the place

Sorry, bad picture lol

The Rodfather. $13
-pork balls with tomato and cheese sauce and pesto on ciabatta

The Rodfather contained pork balls with tomato and cheese sauce and pesto on a ciabatta bun.  It was a huge sandwich!  The pork balls were smooth and pretty good but nothing extraordinarily special than what it was promoted to be like.  I remembered why I’m not a huge fan of ciabatta buns anymore after eating this sandwich; it’s too hard!  Speaking of hard, it was also very difficult to eat this sandwich.  You had to ensure that the balls wouldn’t slide out as you were eating it.  As a matter of fact, the second meatball did actually slide out from my sandwich.  There has to be a better way of eating this!  Cutting the sandwich in half seemed to only help a little bit.

All sandwiches came with a side salad.  The side salad for this was very sour, refreshing, and pretty good!  However, because the dressing of the salad was so acidic, it was hard to finish for some people.  I liked it because it balanced out the greasiness from the sandwich.

The Burger Ball. $13
-beef balls with cheese, pickles, lettuce, and special sauce on ciabatta

Mac and cheese with meatballs

Heh. Ball humour 😉

Since we were a table of 20, we occupied the entire one third of the restaurant.  Some of us ordered meatball sandwiches, some of us ordered mains with meatballs in them.  I think everyone had a good time regardless.

Overall, I wasn’t that pleased with the meatballs or my sandwich.  Maybe if I had ordered the polenta or mushroom risotto with meatballs, I would have been more impressed with the restaurant.