Good food, good wine, good beer, and good fun in the West Virginia mountains
I have now been to the Buffalo Wild Wings at Southridge. My review is in the form of a series of haikus (or is the plural of haiku simply haiku?)
Crispy and large wings
Mango habenero sauce
Good but needs more sauce
For the side order
Undercooked buffalo chips
Ketchup was not Heinz
Service was spotty
Food came out at diff’rent times
But the beer was cold.
I was driving through Kentucky recently to visit some friends and had to stop off and get something to eat, so I went through the McDonalds drive through. I was planning on getting their rip off Chic-Fil-A sandwich (which isn’t as good as Chic-Fil-A, but a good effort, nonetheless), when I saw that this McDonalds was in the test market for the new McAngus, or whatver they call their “premium” burger, launched to compete with the Hardees Thickburger and the Burger King something something angus burger.
I had high hopes for this thing, and had wanted to try one ever since I first heard about it. While everyone else in the fast food business has been launching a higher priced, “premium” burger, McDonalds has seemed to be sitting this one out. When I heard that they had developed one, I assumed that the folks at the McDonald’s taste labs had been working their balls off to come up with something that would knock the ass off the current champ, the Hardees Small Thickburger. I don’t include Five Guys in this, because they are higher priced - sort of like comparing Panera and Subway, sure they both sell sandwiches made on bread made in the store, but one costs a little more and tastes really good, and the other is Subway. Anyhow, back to what I was talking about. This was a big burger (one third pound), which I’m not that big a fan of. The quarter pound size is more or less the perfect size for a burger. Oh well, it looked really good. The toppings looked good, and hell the onions (which typically suck at Micky D’s) were actually good (I think it was a nice big slice of a red onion, but don’t quote me on that). This is a burger and no amount of quality condiments can save you from a lackluster piece of beef. This was not all that great. It was somewhat more beefy in flavor than the standard McDonalds burger, but the texture was dry there was something somewhat off about the flavor. I’m not really sure how to describe the off flavor, but there was something a little shitty about it. In the end, it was kinda good, but kinda shitty. The fries were excellent, as awlays.
*Adendum: I subsequently learned that the McAngus has been released wide and you can get it at the McDonalds restaurants in Charleston, but I strongly advise against it.
Last weekend, my accomplice and I travelled to Maryland to visit some friends. Neither of us had eaten lunch so we had to stop and grab something to eat. After being on the road for a little while, Megan looked in her GPS for food in the area. One place sounded sounded very interesting: The Creamy Castle. We pulled off I-79 just before reaching Flatwoods at Exit 62 (Sutton Exit).
We pull up and find a little ice cream stand type place with park benches out front. Just what we were hoping for. After a quick study of the menu, Megan goes with what they called a “walking taco” (I know a Frito pie when I see one and this was a Frito pie) and six chicken wings. I went with a meatball sub. My sub was pretty tasty and very filling. It had a pretty decent tomato sauce that was not too sweet and a good dose of mozzarella cheese, and was served on a steak sandwich bun (I’d be willing to bet it was a Heiner’s bun). Megan did not share any of her Frito pie, but it looked tasty. For those who don’t know, a Frito pie is a bag of Fritos with chili, cheese, sour cream, etc scooped in on top of the Fritos. In other words, a bag of tasty goodness. I did try one of her wings, they were good and crispy, but not very spicy.
My meatball sandwich. There would be a picture of the walking taco, but someone hasn't sent it to me.
Of course, if you stop at an ice cream place, you must get ice cream, and that’s what we did for dessert. I went with a chocolate shake and Megan went with a chocolate shake with peanut butter syrup. This place made shakes from real ice cream, not soft serve ice cream. My chocolate shake was very good and just thick enough to be a shake but not so thick, it takes a shop vac to get it through the straw. Megan’s was very tasty, kind of like a Reese cup.
If you find yourself driving up I-79 and feel the need to pull of the road and get something to eat or have a tasty ice cream based beverage, make sure to put the Creamy Castle on your radar.
Last Friday, the lovely and talented Megan and the lovely and talented me loaded up and headed off to Athens, Ohio to see the greatest band in the world. Such a trip would not be complete without eating copious amounts of tasty food.
We started off with a pre-concert trip to Della Zona, a little pizza place which seems to be run and staffed by hippies. This place has a great deck area (which did not overlook the ghetto) which is where we sat to enjoy the sunshine. Della Zona serves pizzas made from local ingredients, many organic and/or ethically treated.
Our server promptly came out and took our orders. For appetizers we had the marinated olives and the crostini. The olives were divine, unless you don’t like olives (if you don’t care for olives, you aren’t my kind of people). There was an assortment of green and black olives (kalamatas, manzanilla, picholine, and aragon), marinated in a somewhat spicy olive oil, served up with a couple slices of toasted french bread from the bakery next door (also owned by the same folks). The crostini were four slices of that french bread smeared with a delicious olive “pesto” - two were black olive “pesto”, and two were green olive “pesto”. I use quotes around pesto, because to me this wasn’t so much a pesto, as a tapenade, but whatever you want to call it, it tasted like something handed down by the angels.
Moving on to our pizzas. Megan decided to create her own pizza, which included rosemary, artichokes, greens (tasted like kale, perhaps), and smoked gouda pizza. I went with one of the signature pizzas - the Athena, which had many greek type things - olives, onions, other such goodies. Both pies were excellent. The crust was beautiful, crispy, thin (but not too thin) and even a little bit chewy. In other words, perfect. One more thing about these pizzas: this place makes their own mozzarella. In summary, these pizzas made the pies at Lola’s taste like dog poop (and I really like Lola’s pizza, these are just that much better).
Finally, we had dessert. A different waitress came out and took care of us for dessert. I dont’ know if she was the “dessert waitress” or if our original server just got busy with another table and this woman had to take over for a minute. I like to think that she was a special dessert waitress, who only comes out to tell you about their wonderful desserts, so that’s what I’m going to go with, especially given that she seemed very excited and happy to tell us about the desserts. Anyhow, Megan went with the plum sorbet and I went with a carrot cake cupcake. Both were very good, though the cupcake had been refrigerated, therefore the icing was a bit hard.
Although our servers dressed rather hippie-ish and worked in a place that sells pizzas made of locally grown, largely organic, ethically treated, etc. pizzas, I’m not so sure they were really hippies. They may have looked like hippies, but they did not stink of patchouli and body odor.
After the concert we grabbed burritos from the late night burrito cart, so that we could more fully experience the culinary scene in Athens, Ohio. This was a damn good late night giant ass burrito.
Okay, so I’ve been to the new Vandalia Grille a couple of times and although the food is pretty tasty, the actual lounge is a bit lacking. If you don’t remember the Vandalia Lounge, it was a great little bar on Hale or Dickinson (depending on which side you came in) Street in Charleston, WV. Eventually, the new wore off and people migrated to the bars they had previously gone to and the new “luxury” bar across the street and Vandalia closed down, with a promise that it would return. Over the summer, a bunch of signs appeared in the windows of Vandalia, indicating its return was near and that it would be a tapas bar. Finally, after being closed for nearly a year, Vandalia reopened as Vandalia Grille.
My first trip there, I had about a half hour to kill downtown, so I just popped in to get a dinner drink and check out the place. I quickly realized that this was no tapas bar, rather a tapas restaurant. The place is full of tables and the great beautiful concrete bar is now pick up station for the servers. There are exactly four seats at the bar - two on one end and two on the other. There are no beers on tap, and the beer list is pretty basic, with Guinness and Amstel Light serving as the more exotic selections, which is sad, because Vandalia did always have a pretty decent selection of microbrews and import beers (I will leave it to my friend Rich to explain what a travesty that is). The wine selection was actually worse. Basically, it was red, white or sangria. Back to the layout of the place. The kitchen is right behind the bar where you can see it. Now, this is not a beautiful open air kitchen, no it is just an unattractive griddle, fryers and oven out there for all to see. There is no bar and the whole place does not allow for mixing a mingling, you know, the sort of thing someone would do in a bar.
Okay, I’ve told you what is wrong with it, so now for the good. I have been there a couple of times with friends, so I have gotten to try several things off the menu. The sweet potato fries are excellent. Sweet potato fries are the sort of thing that sounds good, but just about always fails in execution with limp, chewy “fries.” Well, these are pretty excellent. They are crispy like any good fry should be and they have a great sweet potato taste. They come with two very tasty aiolis (flavored mayonnaise) to dip them in; I never caught what they were but one tasted citrusy and the other like a peppercorn kind of thing. The chicken lettuce wraps were excellent, as were the blackened scallops. The scallops were prefectly spicy and were nice and meaty. The pizzas were good, but not quite up to the flavor explosion that is a Lola’s pizza. The little pork shank is very excellent, though I’ve never seen a pork shank so small, these must come from midget baby pigs.
They have several burgers on the menu which I have not tried yet, but sound great, except for one. The offending burger, The Islander, is some sort of pork burger, with pickled cucumbers (where I’m from, we just call those pickles), red peppers (so far it sounds good), and, finally, slathered with wasabi aioli. Why God? Why? This isn’t the only chiptasabi offender on the menu, the other, and possibly worse one is the Andouille and Wild Mushroom Pizza. That sounds really good, until you read the description and see that it is coated with chipotle sauce. Chipotle and cajun: two great tastes that don’t taste great together.
In summation, they have managed to do two pretty incredible things at Vandalia Grille: They’ve managed to make something that sounds great in theory, but always fails in execution actually live up to its potential by making delicious, crunchy sweet potato fries, and they’ve managed to ugly up a once beautiful bar.
