Review: Abuelo's Restuarant (Stand Alone Review)

I've published this same review below in my first post, but I'm reproducing it so it can stand alone.

As usual, we ate out on Friday. We went to Abuleos. This is a Mexican restaurant and you can tell that it would very much like for you to think that it’s the classiest place in town. It’s not, of course, but it was pretty good for Pricey Americanized Mexican (and we’ve had some really bad stuff in this category). It was one of our anniversaries and we’d been saving this place for a special occasion (we’re also learning Spanish now so we figured it was about time we went). I wasn’t too impressed with the food, but then I’m a tough customer what with all the cooking and the eating and everything. The décor was almost identical to a few other Pricey Americanized Mexican joints we’ve been to where the tables and chairs are all on the outside of a stucco-columned indoor courtyard. The difference was that here the mural on the wall and the faux-old-timey portraits on the wall and the big brown plastirock statue in the middle of everything were all of old men (Abuleo is Spanish for Grandfather) and some of the old men seemed to be busily leading young boys into the warm embrace of manhood. It took me a while to realize that the portrait in the bar area wasn’t another creepy grandfather: it was the Dos Equiis guy. Our waiter was a kid who seemed to be very upset that his parents had made him go out and get a stupid summer job. He kept coming around overly conscious of how he could work us toward a big tip that would get him closer to that new xbox game he desperately wanted. I grouched at him once and he pouted away and left us alone until the end of the meal when he again came on too strong as he worked us for the tip. We couldn’t find much on the menu for vegetarians, so Suzanne ended up with the fish tacos. Her platter included pinto beans with bacon. I got a bean tostada and chili relleno platter that had refried beans and spicy mashed potatoes. These potatoes were the best part of the meal—but I’m pretty sure they were laced with bacon grease. If I had to reproduce them, I imagine that the recipe would go something like this: cook a bit of jalapeno and red bell pepper in bacon grease, stir into mashed potatoes, add a big handful of cheese. This was good enough, but of course I think I can do better and I’ll be trying a bacon-free version of these sometime. We also got a dip sampler appetizer and this came with three dips (but no extra chips until I informed our waiter kid that maybe he ought to bring us some): a standard restaurant queso dip, an avocado dip that seemed to be an equal mix of guacamole and sour cream (this was all blended into one green mass that was pretty tasty) and a third dip that we called dead-cow-in-cheese. While we are officially “flexitarians” and aren’t going to go too mad at the occasional bit of cow, this dip had a very “dead” quality to it and it left a really bad taste in our mouths. These dips are probably a way for the restaurant to “repurpose” some of the leftovers from the previous day. It worked well with leftover guacamole but it might have been two or three days on whatever had gone into the cow dip. We didn’t eat very much of it. I don’t really recommend this restaurant (my highest compliment was: “at least they used real cheese”). However, it was kinda fun for our anniversary and we did manage to get that “special occasion feel” out of it.

Review: Gutierrez Restaurant in Salina

We went to Salina for a wedding, visited our friend Susan, and ate out with her at Gutierrez restaurant, one of her favorites.  She’s taken us there once before and both times the food has been pretty good.  The service, however, can only accurately be described by one word: “evil.”

This is an Americanized Mexican restaurant.  The atmosphere is fun and artistic, a nice example of the Amerimexican genre of overly-stylized “phony authenticity.”  It’s worth a trip to this restaurant just to see what they’ve done with the place.  The walls of the dining room are covered with the same type of hand-painted-mural-depicting-stereotypes-of-quaint-18^th / 19^th-century-village-life-in –“old Mexico” that you would expect to find in such an establishment—but it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen, with more artistry and less overt racism than you might expect from such a thing.  In a few places around the dining room, the stucco is cracked (deliberately) and you can see the bricks underneath.  That’s kinda fun.  And I liked the ceiling.  It’s golden tin.  Very shiny.  I don’t know if it quite works with the walls, but it’s cool (there’s a missing logic to the décor: the walls are clearly meant to be the outside walls of an outdoor courtyard overgrown with vines and the ceiling is clearly meant to be the view from inside an expensive can of sardines.  A skylight would have made more sense, but it wouldn’t have been as glamorous). All of this, I’m sure, is meant to provide a feeling of authenticity and tradition that you won’t exactly get from the food itself.  This would make a very good restaurant to take your high-school date to.  The set design is impressive in that way.

While not “authentic,” the food is very good for what it is: Americanized Mexican.  The menu has a good selection of vegetarian dishes, a whole section of the menu is CLEARLY LABELED “Vegetarian Options.”  Suzanne ordered off the CLEARLY LABELED vegetarian menu and got a Spinach Quesadilla with Mango and Avocado Salad.  I had a bite of her quesadilla and it was cheesy, tasty, and stuffed with lots of mushrooms and onions.  She scarfed down the salad before I could try a bite, but I don’t blame her because I had this same salad a year ago when we last visited this restaurant and I knew how good it was.  I believe that I also scarfed mine down last year.  Susan ordered off the CLEARLY LABELED vegetarian menu too and got something they call the “Scofield Special,” which turned out to be a giant vegetarian burrito.  She couldn’t eat it all and took over half of it home.   I’d had what I wanted from the CLEARLY LABELED vegetarian menu last year, however, so I ordered off the regular menu and got a dish called a “Compuesta.”  Here’s how the dish is described in their menu (which is available online both at their website and as a PDF by clicking here):

Compuesta

Sautéed fresh vegetables (zucchini, squash, broccoli, red onions and sun‐dried
tomatoes) tossed with a cream sauce and served over a bed of rice. $12.95

This sounded very good to me.  I waited half an hour or so to get it from the kitchen and all the while I was looking forward to the creamy sauce, the succulent veggies. I tried not to fill up on chips and salsa (lots of sugar in the salsa and not too many spicy things) just so I could fully enjoy the dish I’d ordered.  When I got it, I was surprised to see that the dish was full of chicken parts.  What seemed to be two full breasts of grilled chicken had been folded into the dish (not just piled on top but folded in).  I expressed my surprise to the waitress.  She revealed that she was new and didn’t know what the dish should be.  I told her that I had read the menu and the description didn’t say anything about chicken.  She excused herself and disappeared for at least five full minutes.  When she returned, she had clearly been put up to trying a ploy on me.  She explained that I had not ordered from the CLEARLY LABELED vegetarian menu and that the dish I had ordered did contain chicken.   Ahh.  . . . It was my fault. I had not correctly read the menu.  The only problem with a ploy like this is that I’m not an idiot and that trying something like this is only going to piss me off.  I, of course, responded: “let me see that menu.”  My waitress disappeared for another five minutes and returned with the manager / owner guy in tow.  He took over at this point and opened the menu to the page I had ordered from and, believe it or not, pointed to a different dish on the page and said that the dish I had ordered clearly contained chicken.  The dish he was pointing to did clearly contain chicken.  I called his bluff, explained that I understood that he was referencing the wrong dish, and read him the correct entry just in case he thought I could not read (maybe his usual clientele really is high school kids).  He then explained to me that since I had not ordered from the CLEARLY LABELED vegetarian menu, there wasn’t much he could do.  “Everyone who comes here,” he explained, “knows the menu and knows that this is just a typo and that the dish does contain chicken."    This was infuriating and slimy.  Was this restaurant really that desperate to make 12.95?  Apparently, they were.  After I shot down the logic of trying to blame me for not understanding the menu, the manager / owner guy offered to take the dish back to the kitchen and take out the chicken.  Now I’ve worked in restaurants and I know that all they will do is to pick out the chicken and zap my food and send it back out.  If I’m really, really lucky, I’ll get it back without somebody’s spit in it—but I kinda got the feeling I wasn’t going to be that lucky this time so I decided to keep the dish.  I picked out the chicken myself and set it aside and ate the rest.  The sauce was creamy enough and flecked with pepper.  The vegetables were nicely cooked in a way that left the summer squashes tender yet still slightly firm.  I couldn’t find the sun-dried tomatoes, but I sensed that they might be in there somewhere.   Susan took the chicken home in her to-go box.    

The food was better than it should have been; the décor was muy fantastico; the service was infected with greed.  I don’t blame our waitress for any of what happened with my order.  She was just trying to do her job and was clearly operating under the guidance of the cheap-ass she worked for.  My guess is that she probably won’t work there for long.  She’ll move on to a better place, one with a bit more class, just as all the waitresses before her have probably done.

Two other notes not really related to the restaurant: First, as a vegetarian and someone interested in losing weight (I’ve lost 55 pounds as a vegetarian), I was impressed by how much chicken I didn’t eat.  The dish included at least two grilled chicken breasts worth of chicken.  That’s several hundred calories I set aside.  And the dish was plenty filling enough without the meat.  I’m not such a strict vegetarian that I am grossed out about the chicken (I even ate a small bit of chicken at Easter when my mother-in-law cooked chicken for the family), but it was interesting that I actually had to fight about whether or not the dish should have chicken in it.  The meat-oriented cultural assumptions at play are interesting to observe.  And fights and experiences like this are just part of what it is to be mostly vegetarian in a meaty state like Kansas.

The second note concerns other foodstuffs of the day.  I made us a hearty breakfast to fuel our road trip (Salina is about an hour and a half away from Wichita).  I made a creamy gravy for my leftover biscuits and cooked us up two omelets with chives and mozzarella cheese.  Later in the day, after the restaurant, Susan gave us a treat.  Susan is herself an excellent cook and made us a nice dessert. She’d baked a homemade pound cake and when she served it up, she topped it with strawberries and blueberries and whipped cream.   It was exquisite.  She got her pound-cake recipe from the Fannie Farmer Book of Baking.

Noodles and Company

6-17-11

Friday Restaurant Review: Noodles and Company

This week, we went to Noodles on Rock Road in Wichita.  This is a new restaurant in town, but it isn’t a new restaurant for us:  it’s a chain, a franchise.  We’ve been to the one in downtown Portland, so we were experienced enough to breeze through the line (the people in front of us were in awe of the menu and let us go ahead as they stared and pondered and drooled so much that they became embarrassed that they were holding up the line; I made a point as I accepted their offer of cutting in line to smugly tell them that we had been to the Noodles in Portland). 

The place was hoppin.  Lots of different types of people had come to slurp up the noodles.  It seemed to be quite the trendy thing to do.  I understood as I looked around at all the diners that this restaurant chain was pretty successful at appealing to everybody.  We ate in the same room with hipster 20 somethings, jocks fresh from some sweaty ball game, families with tots in tow, and a bunch of businessmen in shirtsleeves. The concept is this: you can get basically any noodle dish you want from a selection of the world’s great noodle dishes.  If you want Spaghetti and Meatballs, they’ve got it.  If you want a Pesto Cavatappi topped with a chicken breast, they’ve got that.  If your kid wants Mac and Cheese piled with extra cheese, they’ve got that, too.   They let you select the type of “protein” you want and almost everything comes first as a vegetarian dish that you have to pay extra to turn into a meat-laden perversion.  I had Pad Thai with Tofu (you can get tofu as one of the “proteins”) and Suzanne had Penne with Sun-Dried Tomatoes in Cream Sauce (with no additional protein).  She also got a Spinach Salad with Strawberries and Walnuts and Feta topped with a Balsamic Vinaigrette.   These are pretty fancy dishes for Wichita—and getting them at the same place was fun.  And even though it was cheap, it didn’t seem like fast food.  The meal had that “real food” quality to it that you don’t usually get at a fast-food joint.   All-in-all, we were satisfied and impressed.  It’s not fancy (aside from the trendy-fast-food thing that’s the same basic vibe that makes a Chipotle seem like a swingin scene), but it’s tasty and cool.  We had fun and felt like we’d eaten well.  My only complaint was that the tofu wasn’t as good as it was in Portland.  You could tell that the guy in the kitchen didn’t really know his way around a block of bean curd.  The stuff I had in Portland was REALLY good.  Memorable, even.  Whoever the cook in Portland was, he or she knew what to do with tofu, knew what tofu was, knew what tofu should be.  The Noodles in Portland was downtown, in the heart of the action, next to a Sushi joint that was too expensive for us to eat at.  The Noodles in Wichita is next door to Herb Snow and Son’s Maytag Dealership.  Few cooks around here really grok tofu.  Oh well.  It’s a small complaint. 

Later, for our dinner at home, I made Swiss Cheese and Roasted Red-Pepper Quesadillas.