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March 18, 2005
Ó Eating House: Not For Food
Tonight, Alex and I ate at the Ó Eating House. Ironically, it’s closer to us than any other restaurant, yet we’ve avoided it since we got here. So, on this historic night, we decided to violate our intuition and try it.
For starters, it’s within a tent constructed over a wigwam. When seated, I was offered the seat that was part of the wall, and the table was too close for me to get in without climbing over it.
I was immediately sort of appalled by the prices; some website I found indicated that meal entrees were around $8.50, but they seemed to start at $14 and go up quickly to the $22 range. I’m also suspicious of places that have few items and a majority of them being steak. This menu had about 11 things on it, of which four were not steak: salmon, ribs, lamb, and red snapper. Predictably, I had the salmon ($18) and Alex had the ribs ($14). We also had a guacamole appetizer ($10).
The guac arrived and was made with as much onion as avocado—this is not an exaggeration. I thought there was quite a bit of chile, but it was actually just onion. It was terrible. We hardly touched it.
Bread arrived. It was sourdough, which was strange, but not particularly hot and only four sandwich slices. The butter was frozen solid and arrived in little packets, which didn’t work with the gaping holes in the bread at all.
The entrees arrived. Both came with a petite, artistically rendered vegetable mound made with some of the ugliest ingredients I’ve seen. Alex tried them, and reports that they were burnt on the edges but crispy on the inside, and utterly bland. Her ribs were good, with a sweet barbecue sauce, but my salmon was bland as hell apart from the high quality of fish it was made with. It was basically devoid of flavor, good or bad, which means I didn’t think it stacked up well against my “drown it in butter and garlic” method.
Before I talk about Alex’s dessert, bananas foster, I have to talk a little bit about the bumbling waiter. He offended me on many levels: he was dressed casually, he had a very thick Española accent, and he spoke in another direction than looking at us when he first arrived to take our drink orders. He seemed to be quite new. His girlfriend arrived at some point and they hugged and talked up at the register—very unprofessional. Dammit, when I eat out, I’m paying someone else to be my slave. I expect them to be uniformed, courteous and useful and he was just barely courteous and not at all the other two things. I also strongly disliked that the kitchen was in the same room, that the heater was really loud, and that the I could see the cooks taking huge, unlabelled plastic jugs of salsa pouring the condiment into little fancy cups. I especially disliked that we had marginal service from an establishment with three patrons.
Anyhow, the bananas foster are apparently a big deal at this restaurant, rather like the guacamole at Gabriel’s (a much nicer Pojoaque snob joint than this wannabe fuck tent). So bitch boy wheels over his cart and starts in with the making. Then the owner (I assume) came over and started correcting him in his technique, first showing him how to squeeze the oranges, then making him move the heat source to the other side of the cart (bitch boy was lefthanded, making the whole exercise way awkward for him). Then the owner notices us and says “Hi, my hands are clean” and smiles. Great, thanks. Bitch boy dumps the alcohol in and lights it up, owner tells him to dump some cinnamon sugar now, someone turns the lights out. It would have been an “ooh, ahh” moment if I hadn’t ever eaten at a teppanyaki table. I forgot to mention how annoying traditional Native American music is when all you can hear is the slow, steady beat of a drum.
So, I had bananas foster for the first time. Alex informs me that the bananas are supposed to be carmelized (they were soggy), there should have been less cinnamon (it burned my throat), and that the ice cream is supposed to be on top (it was in the cup first, rendering it melted utterly before my first bite).
So from start to finish it was an utter catastrophe. Before the tip, it came to $56, and I would have much preferred eating at the fucking Roadrunner, an Elcam-alike, for 1/3 the cost. We’re also both somewhat ill, so eating out somewhere new probably wasn’t the brightest of ideas, but nevertheless, this was much worse than I expected. Bitch boy earns the coveted “Dan’s smallest tip of the past 12 months” award.
In summary: don’t eat fancy food from a loud and vapid tent filled with ignorant fucks. Ó Eating House: save your cash for the DQ down the street, and get what you pay for.
Posted by FusionGyro at March 18, 2005 10:00 PM
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