Leah and I tried a new restaurant on the advice of a friend this past Saturday evening (coincidentally, we ran into said friend when we arrived at the restaurant).
The food was fine. I only had two minor quibbles. First, onion “strings.” Whose idea was this? And why mess with the classic onion ring, which is in a dead heat with the French fried potato for world’s most perfect appetizer? Onion strings are just a damn mess. They’re difficult to eat whether you’re using your fingers or a fork, and you end up feeling like you’ve eaten a lot more breading than onion when you’re done, which, whether it’s actually the case, is a bad lasting impression to have. I like onion rings. I like their simplicity. I like that you can grab one from a plate and take a bite out of it without thinking too much about it. But onion strings? Feh.
Second: Do not offer a gin martini (and not just offer, but advertise it on your drink menu) without having cocktail onions behind the bar. Who has a full restaurant bar and has no cocktail onions? It drives me crazy. And for Christ’s sake, don’t offer a bleu-cheese-stuffed olive as a substitute for a cocktail onion! That’s like serving a rum and coke with a fat ol’ dill spear. Nothing establishes my faith in a restaurant bar more readily than ordering a gin martini and having it come to the table adorned with at least one cocktail onion.
Wait, I guess there was a third thing. The bun on my burger, while fresh, had a peculiar property whereby it absorbed all the moisture in my mouth as I ate. Combine that with a burger that was slightly overdone (well, past medium rare, at least), and I felt like a garter snake trying to swallow a squirrel. I managed to get it all down, but there was some effort involved. A big shout out to my bottle of PBR (bottles of PBR go a long way towards making up for the cocktail onion thing) for providing some much-needed lubrication; is there any problem PBR can’t solve?