Saturday, June 8, 2019

Restaurant review

My husband and I tried out a new restaurant tonight. Our town is not known for its food. On the contrary, with very rare exceptions, most notably a Mexican restaurant inside a store, the food is very, very bad.

The new place is the heartland's own hipster French restaurant. I think French, although now that I type it, there was almost nothing French about it, except that the steak was served with french fries. My husband ordered steak-frites. "Oh, steak and frites," the waitress corrected. She also brought us our bill before she brought us our dessert. That was unusual.

(When I had asked my colleagues how the restaurant was, they almost always replied--what you would expect for a French restaurant in our town. That explained nothing to me. I had no expectations for such a thing. Now I fully understand what they meant.)

The most unusual part of the evening was when I asked what fish they were serving that evening (the menu said "fish/seafood"). The waitress looked confused. She flipped through the menu. Then, "trout," she declared, without much conviction. Ok, what does it come with? First it was mashed potatoes. It switched to green beans. It settled on mashed potatoes. Ok, I'll take that. She brings it out--it was a small square. I'm no connoisseur, but I thought trout was long and light. This was square and pink. I eat it; it's fine. I hear a different waitress at the next table explaining to the customers that the fish of the day is mahi-mahi. But now I'm not even sure that was right. So I have no idea what I ate. What delighted me so much about our waitress is not that she forgot what the fish was, but that she did not give a s%$* what it was (pardon my french).

All in all, we are glad this place exists in our town, and--I kid you not--we would totally go back. The food was unobjectionable.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Haha! We went to our midwest town's second nicest restaurant, and to be fair to them, they don't claim to be anything fancy. My husband wanted wine and the server brought over a sheet of paper with the offerings and started like this: "Okay, I can't pronounce a single one of these..." and it was just the plain varietals like cabernet, chardonnay, etc.

Emily Hale said...

That's really funny--and funny that we've had parallel experiences!

hopkins said...

there is a ocean trout called steelhead trout that looks is pink, like Salmon, and bigger that river trout. maybe that was it?

Emily Hale said...

Maybe! Although in that case the other server was wrong, and the other server seemed more certain:) That whole evening made me think of you!