Pour one out for GarfieldEATS, North America's foremost Garfield-themed restaurant
The pandemic has hit restaurants hard, but, we were naive enough to think that maybe GarfieldEATS, a Toronto pizza place that pays homage to everyone’s favorite cartoon tabby, would survive this terrible year. We were wrong. Earlier this week, The Garf’s marquee restaurant was forced to close in a dispute over rent payments and alledgedly shitty landlords. Nothing is sacred. Everything ends.
GarfieldEATS only launched last year, created by a team of dreamers who believed the market was more than ready to throw money at a place that promised to make food both “entertaining + engaging” (or “entergaging”) by serving up grotesque, Garf-shaped pizzas smeared with upsettingly orange sauce and a horrific, citrus coffee drink called the Garficcino.
The restaurant’s “Happiness Manager,” Darshan Patel, issued a statement, shared by Barry Hertz, that announced the sad news. “GarfieldEATS closed its storefront last Monday,” the statement reads before adding, “we hate Mondays anyways.” He promised to continue selling the company’s Frozen Big Cow Lasagnas online, stating that “no landlord can take that recipe away from us.” This was accompanied by a tweet yesterday promising us that the business will survive because “Garfield EATS landlords like frozen lasagnas,”
It continues: “Who needs them! Mneowwww!”
GarfieldEATS’ incredible CEO (that’s “Chief Entergage Officer”), who previously did a great job selling us on his frozen lasagnas last week, says that the store’s landlord “is simply greedy after we updated his entire filthy building” and disputes any late or missing rent payments.
The fact remains that, for all the frozen lasagnas and promises of new business developments to come, GarfieldEATS is no longer what it once was. The internet has come together in this time of mourning to share their thoughts on the loss of what could’ve been an essential Toronto institution. @Keffals cried out in despair on Twitter, mourning the loss of “Garfield shaped pizza slathered in Jon Arbuckle sauce.” The extraordinarily named @pissGoblin channeled our collective fury at heartless landlords: “If GarfieldEATS being driven out by a landlord doesn’t make you a Maoist I honestly don’t know what will.”
There are memorials to the restaurant’s exceptional marketing tactics, as well as lamentations over yet another psychic blow in a year filled with them.
R.I.P. GarfieldEATS. We’ll always carry your memory, if not the lingering aftertaste of your Garficcinos, with us.
[via Exclaim!]
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