WHAT-tini?!?
Dec. 27th, 2006 12:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluThrough the wonderous offices of Being An Idiot, last night I found myself unceremoniously dumped off my bus home in downtown Kirkland, some miles short of Bear Creek, where my car was. (Sometimes the bus runs all the way to Redmond, sometimes it terminates in Kirkland. It's not safe to get on without checking. I got on without checking.) I could have waited for the next bus running on to Redmond, but it was wet and cold and miserable (precisely why I hadn't gotten off at Evergreen Point to swap buses) and so I called Hal to Come Rescue Me. Which he promptly did, and whisked me off to dinner. Yay, Hal.
We are adventurous people, the O'Brien clan, and so we opted to try something new: dinner at The Crab Cracker, a self-proclaimed Eastside institution. We've been meaning to check it out forever and it was there, and we were there, and so, hey. On the whole, mixed result.
With the Budweiser neon in the windows, we hadn't been expecting a $20-30 per entree sort of place. And when I'm paying $20+ for an entree, I don't expect to do it in a place that smells fusty, with occasional wafts of Shrimp Gone Way Bad.
The portents augered yet worse when the bread basket came (only after we had ordered -- apparently a precaution against the sort of people who come in, scarf down the Incredibly Valuable Bread, and then run back out again without ordering) and the server asked me whether I wanted dark or white bread. Huh, what? Yes, they bring you a bread basket like a normal restaurant, but then, rather than unobtrusively setting it down along with the spread/dip of choice and getting the hell out of your face again, they serve you your bread with ostentatious flourishes of long, scary tongs, serve you your blob of butter with the same tongs, and then whisk the basket away again. Incredibly Valuable Bread.
Thus violating two pretty basic rules of restaurant service: first, especially above a certain price point, good service does not call attention to itself; it is unobtrusive. The server is there when you need something from her, and absent when you don't. The point of the dining out exercise is the food and the company, not who brings you your plate. Second, if you are going to call extra attention to some menu item by making a production of it, it had better be Good Stuff. Instead, the bread was a very small step up from Wonderbread rolls. My "sourdough" roll was warm only by dint of having been re-heated so many times it resembled toast, while Hal's bread was almost cold. The sourdough managed to be faintly sour without having any other flavor at all. And yet this profound mediocrity of the bread would probably have been unmemorable, had it not been for the restaurant making a Balanchine number out of it.
Luckily, the rest of the food did not live down to the bread. The shrimp spring rolls were warm through and tasty, if absurdly oversized, and both Hal's mixed grill and my bay shrimp Louie were all good, if not notably brilliant. All in all, a perfectly pleasant meal, that simply didn't live up to its price point.
Still, I have much to be thankful for. It was warm, and dry in the restaurant, the electricity worked, and they gave me the perfect name for the current trend in mixed drink abominations. Like so many places these days, the Crab Cracker has a special menu of house mixed drinks which have nothing whatever to do with gin, vermouth, or actual martinis, except for being served in martini glasses and named in dorky ways after the glass. Milk in a martini glass? Mootini! Drano in a martini glass? Alkali-Burn-Deathtini!
And what does the Crab Cracker call its own special contribution to malevolent mixology? Cracker-tinis. So perfect.
We are adventurous people, the O'Brien clan, and so we opted to try something new: dinner at The Crab Cracker, a self-proclaimed Eastside institution. We've been meaning to check it out forever and it was there, and we were there, and so, hey. On the whole, mixed result.
With the Budweiser neon in the windows, we hadn't been expecting a $20-30 per entree sort of place. And when I'm paying $20+ for an entree, I don't expect to do it in a place that smells fusty, with occasional wafts of Shrimp Gone Way Bad.
The portents augered yet worse when the bread basket came (only after we had ordered -- apparently a precaution against the sort of people who come in, scarf down the Incredibly Valuable Bread, and then run back out again without ordering) and the server asked me whether I wanted dark or white bread. Huh, what? Yes, they bring you a bread basket like a normal restaurant, but then, rather than unobtrusively setting it down along with the spread/dip of choice and getting the hell out of your face again, they serve you your bread with ostentatious flourishes of long, scary tongs, serve you your blob of butter with the same tongs, and then whisk the basket away again. Incredibly Valuable Bread.
Thus violating two pretty basic rules of restaurant service: first, especially above a certain price point, good service does not call attention to itself; it is unobtrusive. The server is there when you need something from her, and absent when you don't. The point of the dining out exercise is the food and the company, not who brings you your plate. Second, if you are going to call extra attention to some menu item by making a production of it, it had better be Good Stuff. Instead, the bread was a very small step up from Wonderbread rolls. My "sourdough" roll was warm only by dint of having been re-heated so many times it resembled toast, while Hal's bread was almost cold. The sourdough managed to be faintly sour without having any other flavor at all. And yet this profound mediocrity of the bread would probably have been unmemorable, had it not been for the restaurant making a Balanchine number out of it.
Luckily, the rest of the food did not live down to the bread. The shrimp spring rolls were warm through and tasty, if absurdly oversized, and both Hal's mixed grill and my bay shrimp Louie were all good, if not notably brilliant. All in all, a perfectly pleasant meal, that simply didn't live up to its price point.
Still, I have much to be thankful for. It was warm, and dry in the restaurant, the electricity worked, and they gave me the perfect name for the current trend in mixed drink abominations. Like so many places these days, the Crab Cracker has a special menu of house mixed drinks which have nothing whatever to do with gin, vermouth, or actual martinis, except for being served in martini glasses and named in dorky ways after the glass. Milk in a martini glass? Mootini! Drano in a martini glass? Alkali-Burn-Deathtini!
And what does the Crab Cracker call its own special contribution to malevolent mixology? Cracker-tinis. So perfect.
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Date: 2006-12-27 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2006-12-28 12:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-28 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-28 12:42 am (UTC)Chicken-on-the-bone fast-food places with Incredibly Valuable Napkins.
There used to be, and maybe still, is, a chain in LA called Ko-Ko-Ri-Ko or some such, that served its tasty baked-herb chicken with one tiny, flimsy paper napkin. And if you asked for more, they'd give you ... one more tiny, flimsy paper napkin.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-28 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-28 01:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-28 07:59 pm (UTC)(I'm spilling protein again, so the nephrologist won't let me have more than 40gr of protein a day.)
no subject
Date: 2006-12-29 12:31 am (UTC)mostly unrelated joke
Date: 2006-12-28 05:09 pm (UTC)Three gents were drinking apple martinis in a bar and had gotten to the stage of arguing about details.
“I tell you it’s spelled W-O-O-M,” the first said loudly.
“No no, no,” the second protested. “It’s W-O-O-0-M.”
“You’re both wrong,” the third ventured. “I say it’s W-O-O-M-B.”
A gynecologst passing spoke up. “You’re getting close,” she told them. “Actually, it’s W-O-M-B.”
They stared at her a moment, then stared at each other. Finally one spoke: “Madam,” he said, “it’s obvious that you’ve never heard an elephant fart.”