6th- olive garden, bloomington
13th- snuffy's malt shop, edina
15th- khan's mongolian barbeque, richfield
20th- scoreboard, minnetonka
23rd- mediterranean cruise cafe, eagan
27th- big ten, hopkins

6th- olive garden, bloomington (c)

olive garden, when you're here, you're average.

(this is the third c it got. out of three visits.)

first, the ubiquitous salad and breadstick routine. i did remember to not order seafood here, and went with the never-ending pasta bowl. then since mrs. bad restaurant karma told me to get the garlic alfredo and you should always listen to your mother..... i did.

it was actually not that bad for olive garden, the sauce was decent enough, and had huge chunks o'roasted garlic in it. i got it with whole wheat linguine, so i would feel a tiny bit less guilty for ordering the 'heart attack on a plate' (roasted garlic style). though it was served in a regular sized pasta bowl, the amount i got was noticably smaller than the 'rents platters of spaghetti with meat sauce. odd.

as i managed to suck down the alfredo in short order, i ordered basil marinara with the same pasta. msitake. the sauce was... ishevlis. it tasted like nothing, but a bad version of it. it was served in a much tinier bowl than the first round, and it was about half full (which in this case was good, as i was so not eating that crap).

apparently they so do not want you taking leftovers home at all, and perhaps think you will feel ashamed if you ordered more than one or two refills . that's my guess.

service was what i have come to expect from such a place (as in not that great).

 

13th- snuffy's malt shop, edina (b-)

better than last time, not by much. chicken sandwich was ok. no pickes on the side anymore. we got onion rings, which have changed to ones that i think are premade and they just toss the suckers in the deep fryer for a bit, as they were seemed oddly slick and uniform for onion rings, which tend to be a bit lumpy if you do 'em right. they're more of a fuzzy o then these were. they weren't that tasty either, for that matter.

 

15th- khan's mongolian barbeque, richfield (b)

i used to go to this place a lot when i went to the u (well, the one there) and worked in roseville (again, the one there). loved it then. like it now. i am not sure why i never made it to this one. the richfield one hasn't been redone or something as recently as the roseville one, and feels a bit... stickier... or something in general.

the bread served, baotse it's called, is filled with a sweet sesame seed paste and is steamed, so it's warm and squishy and nice. always loved those. still do. those i can still put away a lot of.

alas, the buffet. for dinner, it's an all you can eat for around $12.50, but most people get the one plate's worth after the app (soup, a crunchy fried crackery thing and a random fried chicken wing... i never understood the fried chicken wing, really.... didn't seem to fit thematically). so the all you can eat thing is a bit of a nonstarter unless you are really really hungry. (lunch i think runs $8 or so, i want to say... could be wrong though).

you heap a bowl with your choice of ingredients from a buffet after the apps. they now label the meats, they didn't used to. then noodles (rice or wheat), and veg, which isn't labelled. there was one we just ended up calling squash, as no one could identify it, even after eating it. then you sauce it (there's a chart for heat as to which combos you would want to do). then you go to the cooking station, and your dinner is mongolian bbq'ed right in front of you. it's like stir fry, only different. they add peanuts sometimes (even if you say you want them, sometimes they don't end up on your plate during the dinner rush, when there's a bit of a line at the cooking station, at least they didn't when we were there).

it's pretty good. i'd warn against certain things, like peppers and cabbage, that are sliced kinda large and hard to eat sans knife (you get a fork or chopsticks). don't go for lots of noodles, they don't shrink a lot. some, sure, a lot, not so much. the tomatoes just seem odd, and the tofu is already deep fried, so why get that and cook it more? they also had krab (imitation crab), which seemed out of place with the rest of the ingredients, like an afterthought.

service was mixed, mostly good until the end of the evening. since we didn't know what time they closed, and they didn't kick us out at closing, we stayed half an hour past that. that was nice of them to let us, but a bit on the odd side they didn't say anything sooner. and i will say the fortune cookies were very vague indeed.

 

20th- scoreboard, minnetonka (b)

yes, climbing up in the rankings (c last time, d+ before that). i really was in the mood for a salad bar, as i wanted what's usually found in one, albeit in a strange combo (not many places you can order tiny tomatoes with cottage cheese covered with shredded cheddar cheese, chickpeas, mushrooms, egg bits, sunflower seeds, and blue cheese dressing with bits of french dressing as a regular salad. sometimes i get weird cravings, though most of the time they are not that specific.... i also wanted a baked potato, but alas, that's not on the salad bar, alas. i'll live, however.).

the bar of salad comes with non salad items here. in this case, you get three soups (reuben chowder, bean and sausage, both unsampled by all, and the cream of chicken curry, which sounds icky, but was really quite good, surprising everyone), a hot entree (in this case some mac and cheese with some unidentified hot bits that nevertheless tasted oddly sweet to me), and soft serve ice cream with toppings.

the service was a lot better than we remembered in ages, and the place was more full than we've seen in a while. a world series game on in the bar (scoreboard, not surprisingly, is a sports bar at heart) would be the reason behind that, but the dining room was rather full even after 7. what a change from a place that mr. bad restaurant karma swore never to go back to. though everyone ordering the salad bar made the check a lot easier for them to compute. and for $7.95, it's easier to feel you ate enough for your money, unlike khan's).

 

23rd- mediterranean cruise cafe, eagan (d)

it started before we got there, really. if you are so consistently busy on a night that you can only get in with reservations, why not mention this fact anywhere on your web site, take out menus, and suchlike? why go to all the trouble of getting people to your out of the way joint just to turn them away?

yep, fridays are usually packed, and it was iffy if all of our group had gotten there if we would have been able to sit even in the bar. as it turns out since they didn't, we did have partial view of the belly dancing show.

they said they were going to find us tables, dumped us in the bar, and promptly didn't look for tables for us so we ended up sitting in said icky smelling bar. and the table we were dumped at wasn't even cleaned off. we had to request it when we finally got the server there many minutes later.

since the bar was overcrowded, and they were understaffed, the poor bar server was doing what they could for everyone (if you're serving flaming cheese as the bartender, you're doing too much at that point and the management should hire another person or so).

they do a lot better for lunch than they do for dinner, apparently. i had the spanakopita plate again, not remembering i had it last time. worse for dinner than lunch. the hummus is still great (that and the niceness of the overworked bar server is saving it from an f), but the rest of it range from ok (falefel) to not that great (spanakopita) to icky (greek salad... why bother with tomatoes at this time of year? why do i need 50 millions tons of lettuce, other than to disguise the fact there's not a lot of real food on the plate?). there were one or two olives, a smallish hunk of not that great feta, and a few pepperocini to round out the overpriced meal. we had to ask for pita for the hummus when it wasn't served.

so dinner here, not at all. lunch here... iffy cause of said dinner.

27th- big ten, hopkins (b)

b, b, b is for big ten.

there are worse grades to get.

service was nice. they were out of the meatloaf that mr. bad restaurant karma was going to get, but the server had a sense of humor about it, so he didn't flip out or anything. water glasses were refilled, etc.

the food was ok. a lot better fries than yesterday (most would have been, actually, if they were edible, but still...). turkey half sub still good. i was actually contemplating a change from the same old same old, but cucumber slices sounded a bit odd to me on the grilled cheese with veg (mushrooms and tomatoes, sure, but i am not that fond of the cooked cucumber experience).

oddly, their lunch menu is longer and more interesting than the dinner. or maybe not so oddly, as if the one in hopkins is like the one at the u, it's more packed for lunch than for dinner, except maybe on game nights or whatever. and more amusing, for that matter.