1st- minnesota state fair, st. paul environs
7th- chevy's fresh mex, eden prairie
9th- falafel king, minneapolis
14th- panzanella bread company, shakopee
15th- mainstreet bar and grill, hopkins
16th- taco bell, edina
19th- dino's gyros, shakopee
22nd- pastrami jack's, eden prairie
23rd- bobino, minneapolis
28th- panera bread, st. louis park
29th- mexican buffet (cactus grill), savage
30th- thailand view, shakopee
1st- minnesota state fair, st. paul environs (a)
much better weather, a lot less food sampled. a lot were repeats. tom thumb donuts, vanilla ice cream from the dairy building (aka empire commons), cheese curds from that one place who's name i am doomed to never remember... though this time we brought water bottles and refilled those. sampled some fudge, it was ok. apparently the irradiated beef was awful (i didn't have any myself).
i did try one new item, and a lovely one at that. the smoked salmon wrap. from the hideously named giggles campfire grill (brings up scaryass spooky clown things combined with... 'and in the morning they found a bloody hook was on the cardoor handle' imagery for me), on machinery hill. it's house-smoked salmon with field greens, greed, red, and yellow peppers, cream cheese and some kind of berry-chipotle sauce thing, just in a hint of it, in a whole wheat tortilla.
it's way too healthy for the fair. besides the salmon having a little bit of a canned texture, it's all good. for $5.25 a great deal, as the sucker is huge (and technically on a stick... a thing is stabbed through with wood both halves to make it easier to transport in the flimsy cardboard). and frankly, it was too healthy tasting, so that's when i hit the cheese curd booth.
anyway, i'd get that again, or it would be easy to rip off for a brunch or something at home...
7th- chevy's fresh mex, eden prairie (b-)
walleye is good. walleye fajitas, well, not so much. tastes good in fish tacos though. go figure. then again, it could be zander dressed as walleye (mutton dressed as lamb?)... the fish itself was good though i am not sure why it had a knot of butter on top with a tiny version of the mexican flag. the corn the weird cactus tortilla chip was good. the salsa was good. the rest, well... eh. everything that should have been grilled to carmelized goodness was still a bit on the raw side. the chicken wasn't well flavored, either.
there were some inexplicable vegetables on the fajita plate. carrots, broccoli, squash. maybe they were meant to be a side dish type thing, but they were with the rest of the veggies. the vegetarian black beans were cold, as was the rice. they do get points for guacamole that came from recognizable avocados, however.
the plating was odd, too. the food was arranged on a huge, multitiered platter. perhaps because they want you to think there's more food than there was (though the amount is not small, it's not as impressive when first spotted). the rice and beans were on a side plate, maybe that's why they were cold. and they give you three small tortillas to hold the stuff. while tasty, they were not enough by half of what you needed to assemble the food.
i liked the long spur's fajitas better. though this i think is one of the dishes i have an idealized version of that i've not found in a while. if ever. not in recent memory, anyway. many are ok, above average.
anyway, the chicken taco was pretty good. i'd recommend that. the meal comes with chips that are light and a good roasted veg (i think) salsa which is mild with a hint of spice. service was highly... blonde. if that makes sense. and the same server was by turns attentive (bringing water when a glass was almost drained) and spaced (um, yeah... asking for the check means... we want the check).
i guess it's decent enough for a chain, if a bit spendy. (again, two for one card for me and mrs. bad restaurant karma... they're an excellent deal if you use one even once a month, let alone the two to four times we average). i wouldn't hurry back, however. there's other places that are local that serve the same thing or better for cheaper, or something like that but more logical.
9th- falafel king, minneapolis (f)
wood found in my food pulls into a commanding lead with the large (half-inch) splinter found in the hummus here. (versus plastic found in my food... wood leads 4 to 2 i think... at least).
also, tuna is not a vegetable.
or a dairy product.
or a fruit.
or a grain.
therefore logic stands to reason it should not be on what is billed as a vegetarian plate.
also on the plate a decent hummus (well, besides the wood in it) ,a bitter tabouli salad chock full of parsely (the kind usually found as garnish), and ironic falafel (though not if you think of king as in burger... think about it, won't you?), tomato slices, an olive, some random lettuce, and what i think was mildly pickled red cabbage but i was not sure, and fries with that, which were seasoned ok but not that good. supposely they've won prizes with their pita bread, but mine was lifeless and chewy and needed heating.
you do get a lot of food for your money, it just is not worth it.
i ordered at the counter, and not a lot of people in line, and it still took 15 minutes to get food that was probably already prepared to the table.
the restaurant itself needs repainting, new furniture, better music (the smooth jazz brought on some kind of cognitive dissonance), and they really should clean up their windowsills, which were a mix of dirt and a few dead tiny flies.
oddly, i had wanted to go to the lunch buffet here for ages, and by the time i get there, there wasn't any buffet, i don't think they do it anymore. which in this case was probably a good thing.
this is the one at lyn-lake, in case you want to know which one to avoid.
i've not had good restaurant luck on lyndale, except for french meadow. (trying to get to bobino, thinking crema cafe served dinner when they don't, wood again in the food in the saigon uptown...) i should try lake street instead.
and i should know better than to cheat on dino's.
14th- panzanella bread company, shakopee (b+)
still with the b+. chicken pesto panini half, per usual, still needed a few more things it it, but was pretty good. with half a greek salad, which i don't think i would try again, and that came with a lovely slice of asiago cheese bread (which i bought a loaf of to take home, plus took someone else's leftovers... though oddly it tastes better as bread than as toast, which was not what i would've figured).
15th- mainstreet bar and grill, hopkins (b+)
teriyaki grilled salmon with baked potato, mixed veg, salad. salad was not great (lettuce boulder, pale sad tomatoes), but the rest was surprisingly tasty. i mean the veg tasted fresh and had asparagus in it, and it wasn't greasy or cold or anything, the salmon was charred on the outside a bit (from the grill, that is), and perfect inside, with just enough teriyaki... it was weird that it was good, and i am glad that i ordered outside of the usual bar food (which is my general ordering rule). i wanted something a bit fresher/healthier tasting (the sour cream i put on the tato would knock out healthy per se). i will report also that the philly style sandwich is good. though it's odd it's served with the type of french dip served more trad with 'roast beast.' service was still pretty kickass.
zesty chicken bowl. not sure why i got it. usually i get the 7 layer burrito (to go, so i don't write about it apparently). the zesty's in the sauce, which is odd, but the thing is weird as a concept, though tastes ok... needs more chicken. anyway.
19th- dino's gyros, shakopee (b)
a periodic look at a place i go to a lot. fries, sure, pretty tasty still. had the hummus wrap, which i don't recall having before. not sure i'll have it again. i am not quite fond of the tortilla they use to wrap it, the sandwich would've been better off in one of their pitas. the hummus was above average, but needed a hit of tahini and a bit more blending for smoothness. the veg in the sandwich were decent. here i'd go with the falafel for the vegetarian option out of all the veg things i've had on their menu.
they have a table sign up that says... try one of our meatless options, and lists a fish sandwich. fish is still not vegetarian (see above). peta should have a campaign or something.
22nd- pastrami jack's, eden prairie (b)
it's easy to tell that the owners bought this place for the view. (that's true that they did...) it's a very nice view, an atrium overlooking a wooded pond.
though it's a bit odd... a new york style deli... in eden prairie... pastoral setting in back... strip mall in front... the interior of which seems very generic.
the food is pretty old school deli. large overstuffed sandwiches, sides extra. everything is on the side of spendy, the largeness of the sandwiches does not make up for paying as much as one does. if $10 gets a turkey reuben, it should be tastier than it was. not that it was bad, it had shredded real turkey, not too much sauerkraut, homemade thousand island dressing on the side... but it wasn't what i see spending that much on a sandiwich in a strip mall in eden prairie should be. or something like that. even if you get a free pickle and some free cole slaw with it.
they had a special, for $3 you get two side items. i went with the salad, which was a mistake. well, the fat free raspberry vinagrette that i got with it was. it was bad dressing. and not vinagrette tasting at all. the salad was the usual lettuce with a bit of cuke and sad tomatoes, i got some ranch dressing to pour over the whole thing. and of course, fries with that, served nice and warm in a wax paper cone propped up in a metal... fryholding... doohickey. they were just ok, though points for presentation.
everything needed a lot more salt, which runs contrary to my deli opinion. sandwich, salad, fries with that.
i do find it amusing that the wait staff were more minnesotan than new york in some ways (the one we had hadn't ever had chopped liver anywhere else), but are vaguely new york style in their manner. they use palm pilots to order. modern technology working for you. the food didn't take that long to get to the table, but mine arrived sooner than mrs. brk's by several minutes (when mine was brought, the person was... did you get anything?).
in the tiny strip mall that it's in, there's another sandwich shop and a chinese restaurant, in the parking lot there's two more restaurants (a grill and an italianish one). a lot of restaurants in a highly obscure area of the prairie of eden. that also seems odd.
would i go back? well, to try their breakfast. maybe the matza ball soups, and one of the hugeass desserts. dunno if i'd go with a deli sandwich again, oddly.
23rd- bobino, minneapolis (b+)
i spent most of my meal staring at nipples. not that it's a bad thing, but they were badly painting. (ah, art). i will say it's a bit odd that at a place that had at the most three tables filled indoors, we were placed at a two top. they could've been nice and put us at a four. maybe they expected a lot more people indoors than showed up. who knows.
now that i got that out of the way... they're much improved since the last time i was here, as at that point i would've been happy not to come back at all. but they have a different chef now... so i though i would press my luck. and no whammys came up.
when asked the soup of the day. we could have sworn the waiter said it was a squash puree soup that was bitchin'... which it kind of was, but it was ginger, which was what he said. had chives on top. it was nice on a day where it felt like fall, finally. the bread brought warm to the table went nicely with it.
i went with salmon on top of sweet corn risotto with asparagus bits (and there was only a bit) and a few pea pods. it was quite nice. not thrilling, but nice. since it was risotto, it did take a while to get to the table, but it wasn't overly long for it. when you order risotto when a place first opens for the day, if they get it to your table in 5, 10 minutes, that's when it's suspicious. (uncle ben's instant microwave risotto?)
the chicken, herbed chevre, and spinach omelet was also quite good. especially the cheese part of it. come with a side salad. french-style, but the omelet was american sized, stuffed with things. not that it's bad that it is.
because we wanted to see what would happened if we did, we got the cheese plate. and it was good. and all there. and oddly this time we got nuts, which were specifically not mentioned on the menu. karma!
for $6 we got a large mound of ewephoric aged sheep's milk (get it? ha. ha. but that is the name of the cheese...) gouda, which did make someone ewepho... er... euphoric, especially with the honey on the plate. i liked it with that and the apple on the bread. the grapes went well with the equally large chunk of the stilton, which i liked more than the gouda mostly as i'm more into the soft, creamy cheese than the aged hardened ones.
for a place that had three tables full at most, as mentioned, it was odd that i didn't get my water glass refilled at all after a certain point. other than that, service was better than last time. average. which for my bad restaurant karma jr thing is technically above average.
prices are a bit on the high side for a casual work lunch, most things run about $10-$15, but the food's a bit above the usual sandwich and chips.
28th- panera bread, st. louis park (b-)
we were actually at another restaurant, but then the bad restaurant karma kicked in... park tavern. we sat. we ordered. we waited. waited some more. some other people sat. ordered. and got their food. we waited, we asked, we were told that ours was coming soon. we left. (we told them we were leaving, and why and such, too, in case y'all were wondering).
so we went to the panera down the road... a bit better than other paneras, but that's probably because i chose more wisely and went for no kind of salad. black bean soup and a turkey and artichoke heart panini. their warm sandwiches are better than the cold, and the turkey is deli-style, but it's the real thing rather than the processed turkey bits slices. the soup was a bit cold, however, and there were no crackers for it, and was a bit thin, especially compared to the food porn shot they had of it prominently displayed. they do serve it with bread, but i find the lack of crackers a bit weird. soup needs crackers. so there.
29th- mexican buffet (cactus grill), savage (b)
so of course since i crave some kind of chicken in a tortilla, that's the day there's no chicken to put in tortillas on the buffet (and when we got there, no tortillas... they appeared later on). such is my life. i went with beans and refried rice in a burrito along with random veg, cheese, sour cream, red and green salsas. also some mini-empanada type thing filled with beans. tried a bit of pineapple dessert of some sort with a graham cracker crust, could've lived without it happily. they had on kdweeb half the time we were there, then they switched to the local spanish station. that was odd. they didn't have the liquid cheese, which is probably good as i eat too much of it when i probably should not be eating any of it. but i'm not always smart.
30th- thailand view, shakopee (b+)
i was surprised when shakopee got a thai place. location-wise it didn't seem too auspicious. and there's always next to no cars in the parking lot here. don't let that fool you, they do a decent business in takeout, so i've been told. when i got there at around 5:30 pm ther was one fairly large group, and a table of four there.
the policy i follow at my first visit to thai places that i may frequent is to try the pad thai on the first visit. my theory is that if they can't do that well, they probably can't do a lot well. i got mine medium, with chicken. it was probably the best redition of a spot-on medium that i've ever had- not mouth-burningly hot, but just a lingering heat. it had the right amount of sauce, and the it all worked well together.
small things, though- it was plated oddly, with the bean sprouts piled on one bit of the plate, peanuts on another, and the rest in the middle and the plate was not quite large enough to mix it well. i also prefer more veg in mine, but since the chicken wasn't all that tender i may just go with the veg one next time. or try something else. many things on the menu looked intriguing, though a bit spendy. i wonder if they lower prices for lunch, as $9.50 is a bit spendy for a pad thai lunch. if they do, i may have to switch between here and dino's.
the decor is a bit generic, and the music odd, but hey, i'm used to that in the area. the southern suburbs are not known for restaurant decor as a whole. the servers were above average. i am a bit confused as to why i got a fortune cookie, but i think for a place called thailand view, they have a few sino-american dishes.
© The bent sun as risen.