Mediocrity Rules

If given the choice to cook or eat out, I will almost always say cook. Not only do I enjoy cooking, I know what I am going to get if I cook and I know it's going to be great. I find going to restaurants is like gambling. Do I want to bet an average of 20 to 50 bucks that Mr or Ms supposedly-professional-cook won't ruin my evening? Well, the answer is usually that I do not.

Today Matt and I had long days and when he came home after 8pm I was famished and we had nothing in the fridge. "Let's go out!" we said. As I've mentioned, Matt's obsessed with veggie burgers and this brunch place, One World Cafe, usually has a veggie burger of the day that he never gets to order because we are always in there for breakfast foods on weekends. We've had dinner at OWC before but not in quite a while, either we were a lot more tolerant of mediocrity last time we ate there or things have really gone down hill.

With our menus we received a list of specials, the page boasted about Indian spiced vegetables, including fresh green beans and bell peppers, served with a baked marinated ginger tofu over a bed of rice in a coconut sauce. The page also informed us that the veggie burger of the day was a tofu vegetable burger with honey mustard and "the works". The day's special appetizer was baba ganoush. Sounds good doesn't it?

We placed our orders and disaster ensued. The baba ganoush had the flavor of a kindergartener's tub of paste and 8 skimpy strips of pita bread with which to scoop up a heaping mound of the stuff. Not that how we'd finish this slop was a concern since our main courses arrived about 6 bites into our appetizer.

Matt's "burger", although displaying a few grill marks for show, was soft and soggy, quickly falling apart and giving us reason to believe the main ingredient was not tofu, but in fact, mashed potatoes. Actually I think you could coax more solid texture out of mashed potatoes, so I am still at a loss as to how this "burger" was concocted. Speaking of mashed potatoes, Matt ordered a side of them, which he informed me had the blandness of sand. Although the potatoes supposedly were made with garlic, nary a hint of it was to be tasted.

As for my meal, it was about 2 lbs of rice topped with what I imagine was some sort of store-bought sauce mixed with frozen or canned green beans and red peppers that had been revived in a microwave. No tofu was present whatsoever. The lifeless, soft, soggy veggies came with no tofu and "spiced" for the palate of a 90 year old with high blood pressure and diabetes. I pushed my food around on my plate and got progressively more vocal about my green beans which were not "fresh green beans" but that sickly, muddy, boiled for days green of Gerber strained peas.

After about 20 minutes our server finally came to ask me if I wanted my mostly untouched meal to go. I told her I did not. I really dislike to complain in restaurants. It seems almost pointless since the person you are complaining to didn't cook the meal and probably doesn't know all that much about cooking any way. I imagine the average restaurant server subsists on a diet of day old coffee and cigarettes. In spite of all of this, I tried to calmly and politely explain that I was disappointed with my meal. The server replied "well, next time let us know earlier and we can bring you something else." LET YOU KNOW EARLIER?! Are you kidding? You just came by to fill our water glasses 20 minutes after our food was served. Do I want you to bring me something else at this point? No I do not, my dining companion has already choked down his meal and wants to get out of here and from what I've seen of the evenings offerings so far, I can't imagine something else is going to hit the spot any way. I will just take my atrociously overpriced bill and get the fuck out of here and go home and make myself something to eat.

I wanted to leave no tip. I couldn't really do it since I am always imagining restaurant servers are harried, struggling students without health care or something and I'd feel like a fascist for stiffing them. Fifteen percent was all I could muster. I normally leave over twenty and tend to be tolerant if the server is busy and not take bad cuisine out on them. It was this business of telling me I should have asked for something else that got to me. Maybe I would have if I'd been asked about that in a reasonable amount of time.

As we were leaving I saw a girl picking at her plate and overheard her say to her server (who did come to see how they were doing at her table) "Wasn't this supposed to come with tofu?"

Where's my chef's knife...

Foodie Tourism

In March, Matt and I went to NYC for the express purpose of gluttony. Because we're kind of vain we spent the previous week eating nothing but salad so we wouldn't come home too hugely fat. It's kind of an odd position to be in -- adoring cooking and food and worrying about putting on weight. I think most people are in one camp or the other. Matt and I are usually in binge or diet mode though to keep things under control.

Any way, if there is one thing NYC has going for it, it's lots of great veg eateries. We hit up some old favorites, including VP2 and Red Bamboo but we also found a few new spots we loved. We were both completely taken with Gobo. Even my friends who are not vegetarian who joined us there were blown away. They have a delicious menu and their food presentation will knock your socks off. If you only go to one veg eatery in New York this one would be my suggestion.

Vegan French Toast With Bananas @ Counter

For breakfast, I really liked Counter on the lower east side. They had a perfectly decadent vegan french toast and Matt was pleased with their veggie burger. (Matt is a veggie burger afficianado.)

While in New York, we also paid a visit to the May Wah Vegetarian Grocery. A small storefront in Chinatown with nothing but frozen food cases. Inside you'll find a veg version of just about every meat product under the sun. I normally am not all that into meat substitutes but I enjoy the novelty of cooking with something new and sometimes I do wonder if my culinary repertoire is really suffering due to limiting my ingredients to things that came out of the ground. We bought a ton of stuff from this store, some of it was pretty good, some of it I probably wouldn't buy again.

The funny part about this experience is that once I got several shopping bags of these meat things home and into the freezer I had no idea what I wanted to do with them. I actually had to comb the web for recipes that involved meat! The best recipe I found was this one for Lamb Chianti. We made it using May Wah's vegetarian mutton which I think we'd buy again in the future. May Wah also has some vegan citrus ribs that are delightfully spicy. Some of the vegetarian fish (abalone and shrimp) were either a little rubbery or a little bland so they were not our favorites. If you're looking to give some of these products a go, May Wah does ship their products all over, just visit their site for details.