None of the Mongolian barbecue places are great. I think the best thing you can say about all of them is that the food is cheap, filling, and can be healthy (depending on what you select). Sometimes, cheap and filling is what you want. Mongolian Grille, I think, provides the best asthetic experience. Except for the men's room: seriously, guys, what's up with that?
Not a whole lot to report differently than last time. The food remains good, and a good value for the money. Now if they could just lay out the line so you could pass on either side...
Ah, the corporate Christmas function.
I hear people complain about how many restaurants come and go in Westlake. My response is, "Really?" Bombay Grill and Chinatown have been there for years, along with a couple of other restaurants I'm blanking on. Generally, what they're talking about are places like this (which used to be a Rockfish: before that, I can't recall what it was).
And there are reasons why restaurants come and go. Some of them are out of the restaurant's control (high overhead, for example; I doubt this space is cheap). What I find about Red Bud Grille is that it is an adequate restaurant, with somewhat high prices. Perhaps the high prices are needed to cover the overhead, but the food should be pretty good in that case.
It isn't. The food is just...okay. For example: I had one of the "gourmet" hamburgers. It was a decent enough burger, but not as good as Billy's on Burnet, or Red Robin. And it was a $9 burger. (Really, closer to $11 by the time I finished adding stuff to it.) This is a good $2 - $3 more than Billy's or Red Robin, and the burger was smaller, too.
They do have things other than burgers, but I didn't hear from anyone who was really impressed by their non-burger dish. The staff is nice enough, and they do have a 1/2 price burger night on Monday.
Red Bud just seems like an ambitious idea that doesn't quite work in this location.
Nice looking place, not too crowded, with thoroughly uninspiring food.
All the appetizers (calamari, crab-cakes, and crab-stuffed jalapenos) were adequate, but little more. My gumbo was merely tolerable. Salad was decent. Both my own pork loin entree, as well as A. T.'s steak churrasco, seemed undersized for the price. The bread pudding was fine, though not in the same league with the best I've had.
If I end up going back there, I'd like to try a hamburger, which they seem to be more geared toward anyway. But based on what I did try, I can't recommend them as a destination restaurant.
Why do an SDC at a place we go to fairly often? Two reasons: one was that Lawrence wanted someplace close and convienient. The other was that we wanted to conduct...an experiment.
What kind of experiment, you ask? Two words: Peking Duck. Yes, the kind you have to order 24-48 hours in advance.
And how was it? I think I expected more from a dish that required that much advance notice and preparation. (Tien Hong served the entire dish in pancakes, moo shu style: no broth, no separation of the meat and skin.) It was good (as were all the appetizers, but their hot and sour soup could use improvment), but not the best duck I've ever had. Or even the best duck of 2006.
I have complained about the limited menu at Carrabba's, and the fact that you can't gt any of the dishes Johnny Carrabba and Damien Mandola cook on their PBS cooking shows there. Comes now Mandola's Italian Market, which could be seen as an answer to my complaint.
How is it? I'd eaten there a couple of times before this SDC, and liked it. They do an excellent Italian Wedding soup and a very good spaghetti carbonara, along with good pastries and dessert items (including gelato). I haven't had a chance to try their sandwiches yet.
This time around, though, I let Lawrence talk me into ordering pizza. Unfortunately, I didn't find their pizza really compelling: it isn't a bad thin crust pizza (and a large is really a two-person pizza at best) but it isn't as good as Rounder's or Home Slice. And it bothers me that there's no small salad you can get with a pizza or a pasta dish. I did think the antipasto was good (probably worth the full $15 if you really like pickled veggies: I appreciated the seperation of the veggies from the meat) but I wasn't impressed with the garlic fries. The olive al ascolana is a neat appetizer, though; how can you go wrong when the words "stuffed with pork" and "deep fried" are part of the description?
I like Mandola's enough to give it a slightly qualified recommendation, based more on my other visits than this one.
And here we have another Italian Market/Restaurant combination, not unlike 360 Uno. However, unlike 360 Uno, as a restaurant, Mandola's is a fine Italian market.
The appetizers (garlic fries, fettunta (round garlic bread toast slices), and an antipasto platter) all struck me as decent but not particularly great deals. (Though it occurs to me that this is the case for pretty much all the antipasto platters I've had; there's just too little among the pickled offerings I'm interested in, especially here, at $15 a pop.)
And as for the pizza, they say that the large serves "4-6 people." This is a lie. Maybe four anorexic supermodels who had already had appetizers, but certainly not four humans. I could have eaten half of one and still felt peckish. It was decent thin-crust pizza, but nothing I'd go out of my way for.
The only thing that impressed me about Mandola's were the desserts, of which there are a wide range, and my ice cream and èclair were both very good.
Maybe some of the non-pizza entrees are better. But combine the shortcomings with a cramped, undersized dining area, and I can't really come up with a compelling reason to eat there rather than picking up something to go. (And if you want to pick up pizza on the way home, the Mangia on Guadalupe is a far superior choice.)
See the logs for January of 2007.