🚀 go-pugleaf

alan@elroy.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Alan S. Mazer) writes:

>My fiancee and I had an interesting experience which perhaps someone could
>shed some light on.
>
>Just for the heck of it, we went to a Rusty Pelican.  Never been there
>before.  Had a long wait, on a Sunday night.  The restaurant was packed to
>the gills.  But the service was slow and just poor.  They took forever with
>everything, ignoring empty water glasses and waiting 10-15 minutes to fill
>them once we asked for more.  The calamari appetizer was battered to the
>point that you couldn't taste much.  Champagne (it was a special occasion,
>her birthday) was okay, but overpriced.  Clam chowder (a favorite of mine)
>had very little flavor or clams.  Steak was tough and without flavor.  (I
>should have been clued in by the fact that they brought me A1 sauce.)  Did we
>just hit this place on a bad night or is it always like this, and if the
>latter, why is there such a wait for a table?  For the money ($50?) there are
>other places we could have gone for a much better dinner.

I can't tell you if your experience is typical or not of a
Rusty Pelican, but to be honest I wouldn't have gone to one
in the first place.

In general I've found that the food in chain dinnerhouses,
with very few exceptions, is unmemorable at best.  There are
even some restaurants which are technically not a chain but
which have a "chainy" kind of feel.  That's to say, they
emulate the habits and practices of chains.  In the end the
experience feels sort of anonymous and plastic.

By far the most interesting restaurants to me are ones 
where an individual or small team with a vision of one kind
or another has opened up something that is one of a kind.
Some of these places are expensive, but not always; most of
my eating out is in ethnic places that aren't pricey at all.
If you keep an eye on this newsgroup long enough, you'll see
a lot of places that are much more interesting to eat at
than a Rusty Pelican!

As to why so many people would go there, I guess it's sort
of like some kinds of top 40 music.  Sure it's pablum, but
it's all that some people know ...

Frank
frank@jplpost.jpl.nasa.gov