I find most restaurants pretty
underwhelming. The fare doesn't blow my socks off unless I'm looking
only to gorge myself. After-which I lie fat and motionless like an
elephant seal on a beach after swallowing 150 herring.
“Ughhhh..I shouldn't eaten it
all...if I just can fall asleep...”
Chain restaurants are the worst I find.
You get these surgically proportioned meals priced surgically too.
Applebees was one experience I found myself never returning too.
Chicken Broccoli pasta with a Mornay sauce is great, but not when
they give you handful of angelhair dampened with the sauce. The
chicken was deviously prepared by slicing a breast in half then
flattening one half of it with a mallet. Bastards.
Then there was Margarita's, which
specializes in salt. I like salt, probably more than the average
person, but when you cure all your offerings with enough salt to make
it last past Judgement Day, I gag. I was told later that it was in
an effort to help you purchase more of their signature margaritas to
wash it all down. Their “El Presidente for Life” margarita was
the size of a gold fish bowl that came with a hefty $12.99 price tag
and I don't even like tequila to begin with.
It's all about keeping food costs under
the Prime Directive of 30%...and charging the customer as hard as you
can.
There are exceptions though.
Cedar Street in Sturbridge, MA
surprised me. The prices do tend to kick you in the balls but it's
not like Menton's in Boston...where the check can easily rise to
$300, up that to $500 if you want wine. What was I doing in an
up$cale restaurant knowing I'm a cheap, skinflint Yankee? Easy
answer. I didn't have to pay! The Worcester Telegram paid! One of
the friends I've had along the way was their food/wine critic and he
was allowed to take along one person when he visited various middle
Massachusetts restaurants. His job wasn't to crucify these places as
they liked to buy advertising space in the Telegram, so every review
was 3 stars or up. Only one place was a Choke 'n' Puke and they got
three stars too.
Cedar Street was one restaurant where
the claim to understand food actually was true. The combinations of
foods/flavors to produce a first, second and cumulative, special
third flavor actually occurred. I thought one offering, a vegetable
terrine, would be as boring as cut grass. I was wrong. The thing went
off in my mouth like a hand grenade and it wasn't due to spices
either. It was the various veggies they combined together to get that
effect.
I forget what the name was of what I
had, Camel ala Red Sea but it was some middle eastern meat that was
done well. If I wanted strange, foreign flavors, I got them in this
dish. Most dishes, their ingredients, tend to sum themselves up into
a final tally. It tastes like this. When you can
prepare it so that every ingredient has it's time on your tongue,
like a stage, then walks off, one after another, is something to
experience. That dish was like this.
Cedar Street won it's five stars from
my friend.
By the way, want to get excellent
service in a place? Whip out a pocket notebook and scribble anything
on it while you are being served and as you eat. The servers will
run back to the kitchen to report there's a food critic there.
While we were at Cedar Street, Rick,
the Telegram critic, tried to hide his note taking but was busted by
one of the young waitresses who badly tried to hide her “Oh, I have
to go the the kitchen to pick up an order” and alerted the chef.
The service after that went up 300%.
Since he was busted, Rick went to the
kitchen afterwards to tell the chef there were no worries, the chef
scored the five stars anyway.
Know what I think is another Five Star
place? House of Pizza on Division St in Pawtucket. A proper pizza,
when tilted, must have it's grease slowly run across the top. Also,
you better see them making piles of fresh dough every day. Yelling at
the customers in Greek helps too.
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