Sweet Mel's

I'll preface this by saying this restaurant is definitely getting a recipe rebuttal. Why? My burger was cooked medium well-well when I asked for medium rare. If you are a burger place, and you offer variations in cooking time, execute to the specifications given to you. If you don't want to read the rest of my review, I understand. If that shit bothers you as much as it bothers me, you have no reason to go there.

All I can say is, as a burger joint, their deep fried oreos were delicious.

And now proceeding with the due diligence:

To be honest, I do not like downtown Gainesville. Parking there is a pain. You commonly have to fight through the club goers to get to the good places. The random one way streets can be annoying. All the same, reviewing a restaurant requires a harmonious frame of mind. If I'm not judging restaurants on the length of time it takes to get the food, judging them on inconvenience to get to would probably be unfair. All the same, full disclosure: I don't like downtown Gainesville. Does that affect my reviews? I hope not, but that's the reality.

So I, along with 5 other people decided to visit Sweet Mel's after a play reading. The main promise of a substantial variety of burgers perked my interest. Like pizza, burgers can be a fairly blank slate by which you can make some incredible things. All it takes is using some quality ingredients and you can make a simple and delicious burger. Vary up the toppings, and you can really make something spectacular. The truly great burger places grind their own meat, which you can usually taste. As a result, I'm always up for giving a burger a shot.

The first page of the menu is basically all their varieties of burgers. There are twelve burgers, all of them around $9. My girlfriend and I were hungry so we decided to go with the onion rings as an appetizer for $6.

The onion rings were pretty good. Solid texture. Not too greasy. I'm pretty sure they used a beer batter to create a very crisp onion ring. The onion rings themselves were pretty large and had good body to them. All the same, at around $6, I really didn't feel like I got my money's worth. There just weren't many onion rings for the price. I'd say they were worth about $4. That's 150% more than what I felt they were worth. Part of the issue is that they were actually pretty good, and I did want more...just not at that price. Onion rings are cheap to make.

I ordered the Smokey Mountain BBQ. It came with BBQ sauce, bacon, onion rings, and cheddar cheese. When I was asked how I liked mine cooked, I said medium rare...so I expected medium rare. This is how it looked:

While the burger does look good, the problem is at the heart of the burger. The meat itself just isn't very good. I didn't get much of a crust on mine implying that the surface it was cooked on just wasn't hot enough to build the necessary Maillard reaction. But the main problem:

It's just grey. The burger was cooked medium well to well done. Vastly different than the medium rare I requested. Beyond that though, the meat itself tasted pretty bland. Is that due to it being overcooked? Potentially. It could have just not been very high quality beef though. It certainly wasn't grass fed, and it certainly didn't have a very fresh taste. Further, the trick most people use with burgers to put a layer of mayo or something to prevent all the grease from the burger from annihilating the bun was not to be found here. As a result, the burger basically disintegrated about halfway into the eating of the burger. Further, the bacon was overcooked, so even ol' reliable bacon couldn't be counted on to bring more than just a texture.

The specialty burger I also encountered was their breakfast style of burger. Instead of hamburger buns, they used french toast. It also included an egg, 3 slices of bacon, cheese, and hash browns.

The burger was, like my burger, cooked past medium. The bacon wasn't any more flavorful than mine. The hashbrowns tasted like more like they had once been frozen instead of the kind of hashbrowns you get at a legit breakfast place. The egg was also overcooked (seeing a theme.) I thought something that could have pulled it together was a more runny egg that could have been a sort of Eggs Benedict effect with a looser yolk. The French Toast was barely coated in the egg batter you want with good French Toast, and it certainly didn't use a good quality French bread (which you'd want with French Toast...go figure.) As you can see, there's more confectioner sugar than batter. In the end, it just didn't offer much.

Along with the burgers came the choice of a side. I got the Devil Fries, which were basically just fries with some cheese melted on top tossed with some buffalo style sauce. They kind of soaked the fries, which killed the crispiness. Instead of giving a spicy seasoning to crisp fries, melting the cheese, and then having an interesting spicy sauce for the fries, it felt just kind of half-assed. My girlfriend's sweet potato fries were OK. They weren't as crispy as they could have been, but that's the only issue I had with them.

My girlfriend and I decided to split desert. We went with the deep fried Oreos. We got four deep fried Oreos for $6. It was actually a pretty cool desert. The batter was light and tasty. That being said, I think $6 is still a bit much for 4 deep fried Oreo cookies.

In the end, Sweet Mel's seems to be more of a bar that is trying to have some food options more than being primarily a food place. Randomly during our meal, club music came on really loudly. There was nobody dancing. There were no lights or anything. It was just sort of bewildering. The food took about a hour to come out as well, while we were the only ones in the restaurant. I'll have to admit I was pretty confused by that considering burgers take all of eight minutes or so to cook and set up (if you've done any semblance of kitchen prep.) As I said, I don't tend to judge restaurants on this (probably the thing I have most in common with the Frnech besides a love of roux,) but I felt it was worth noting by its weirdness.

To conclude, I do not recommend this place. If you want a great burger, my favorite in Gainesville remains The New Deal Cafe.

-Charles

Mahzu Sushi and Grill

Mahzu Sushi and Grill. Located on Williston and 34th.

Sushi, Sashimi, and Gainesville do not go well together. There could be a couple of reasons. The main one being that we are not at the intersection of a great fish market required for the sushi places that truly excel. All the same, we're in Gainesville. Not Oklahoma. Decent quality fish is all of 2 hours away at most in either Tampa or Jacksonville. This is no Herculean task. All the same, I get the impression that sushi restaurants here largely just don't get the whole "sushi" thing. Why is that? Well, my working theory is that most of the sushi we see in Gainesville are from people that are not fully trained in it. A lot of the time I think we're seeing restaurants that want to put sushi into their menu, but don't know the effort really required to do it correctly. The better sushi restaurants require their chefs in training to just wash rice for 3 years before moving on to actual construction of the rolls. Does anyone honestly believe that is happening here? Sashimi is no less of a challenge, requiring some of the best knife work in the cooking world. Realistically though, you have an upper bound with sushi and sashimi and that is the quality of ingredients you obtain. High quality ingredients equals better quality sushi and sashimi. It's just that simple. That being said, bad knife work and spotty fish inspection can sink a sushi and sashimi place to a discerning crowd, while no amount of great knife care or fish inspection of a bunch of old and crappy fish will save your place. All the same, there's no reason to half ass just because you aren't working in the Tokyo Fish Market.

So we have an upper bound of ingredients for Gainesville, which, theoretically, should still be moderately high. Have any places in Gainesville lived up to that upper threshhold? Well, no. There's a cost component of bringing in daily fresh fish that would result in very highly priced sushi and sashimi that would likely just not work as a business model here in Gainesville. So we refocus on saying what's the best quality of sushi and sashimi we can get at the more moderate price points we associate with sushi here. The reality is that sushi must be mildly profitable here, or we wouldn't have such a high number of places that seem to provide it. At last count on Archer between 34th and the I-75, you can get Japanese food from 6 places. I'll get to those places eventually, but for now you have to wonder about the addition of one more sushi place in here when nobody seems to get it right. All the same, the addition of a new restaurant, Mahzu Sushi and Grill, at the old Green Plantains location in the Williston Publix shopping center does provide people who live in the Laurels, Campus Lodge, and The Polos a closer place to eat than the various Archer restaurants.

I'll preface by saying that the kind of sushi most Americans are interested in makes no real difference regarding where you go. If you go to a sushi place and order something deep fried and covered in cream cheese, you should probably just go where it's most convenient, and this location is, in fact, very convenient for not insignificant portion of the off campus living in the general area. If you go to sushi to get rolls where you want the fish to be just a tiny bit covered in other bold flavors, it probably won't make much of a difference to you either. A bad sushi place might take a bit longer, and your rice probably won't be as good, but it'll still come out about the same as a good place when dealing with those rolls. This isn't really a knock on any person likes those rolls. It's just the reality of the situation. What's the difference between an 8 oz sirloin steak at one place and an 8 oz sirloin steak at another if you cover it in a completely overpowering BBQ sauce? The theory is about the same here.

My girlfriend and I got to Mahzu at around 8 PM on a Monday, so I was expecting it to be fairly slow, and it was. We chose to sit at the sushi bar, which is what I prefer to do when I go to a Japanese place where I'm expecting to eat sushi. It's a new place, and I'm inherently suspicious of sushi in Gainesville, so I wanted eyes on the fish I was going to be eating for signs of what was to come. Alas, the condensation on the inside of the display and refrigeration section most sushi bars have largely blocked my view. I'd have to wait for the meal to come out before I could pass judgment on the state of the fish. I made some small talk with the sushi chef asking where he trained. New York, he claimed. One of the three cities in the US where you can be assured that if they worked at any kind of decent place, they would have been well trained. Expectation go up a touch at this.

So I looked through the menu deciding what to order and discovered a fairly pleasant surprise. The menu showed that they are dedicated to being a real Japanese place. The inclusion of toro and uni was frankly shocking. Not on the menu were a bunch of pan Asian dishes watering down the idea that they are really dedicated to their purpose of providing good Japanese food. Not unexpected, we see teriyaki, tempura, and udon (a bit more rare) dishes. The real surprising part is the Hibachi section. Americans tend to have a weird approach towards Hibachi where they seem to overlook it unless cooked in front of patrons. Personally, I don't particularly care about that kind of thing as it does always tend to come down to flavor for me. Personally, Hibachi for a large group becomes very difficult as the nature of it means all food is coming out at uneven times, and ideally you want to eat a lot of that stuff right off the grill. Here, the hibachi is done in the kitchen which allows them some better quality control. A solid focus on seafood hibachi bodes well, but they have steak and chicken as well. Further, they have Bento boxes similar to what Ichiban offers. One thing did make me apprehensive though. Seeing deep fried rolls always makes me feel a bit curious as there is, quite literally, no way to do those in keeping with the care and dedication considered in making fresh sushi. I could see this as merely pandering to customers that demand it (and from what I've heard from sushi chefs, it's a pretty common request,) so it's unfair to judge restaurants too harshly for that if they deliver on the good stuff.

Getting the measure of the quality of a sushi place is actually super easy. Here's the things you need to order: their sashimi platter, a simpler style roll, and a simple nigiri. I tend to ask what roll and nigiri they do best, as a sushi chef should not bullshit you and should know what they have fresh and what they do well. If you're a general fan of sushi and sashimi like I am, this isn't that big of a deal, but I do know that some people don't like the taste of certain fish. For those people, try to give the chef a few options and see which one they think is best (the benefit of sitting at the sushi bar though good waiters should be able to give you a good answer too.) Regarding the kitchen area of a Japanese restaurant, you can usually tell the quality of their kitchen by their fish. Chicken and Steak are hard to mess up, so I tend to pass right on by these when I'm trying to gauge quality. Salmon Hibachi was on the menu, and at a good price of $16. The recommended roll was the spicy tuna roll. Their sashimi deluxe seemed to have the best variety for me to try. As sashimi deluxe platters are usually chef choices as well, you can tell a lot about the chef from this dish.

A pleasant surprise was that the sushi chef gave us a free appetizer in the form of a cold squid salad.

The fresh flavors combined with a bit of vinegar and bit of something sweet that I couldn't quite place. It provided an excellent appetizer, and at the price of free, it approaches the null set of value. The squid combined with sweet and sour of the light sauce in a flavorful way. There were a few little extra touches to the squid as you can see, but it's clear the goal is to make the squid the star of the dish, and it did very well. An excellent palate cleanser for the food to come as well.

The spicy tuna roll was $5 and the sashimi platter was $18. Spicy tuna at $5 is a pretty good deal if you can get the tuna scraps they cut off to prepare the sashimi. Usually those little chunks are just as good, and you won't know/care if they're put in the sushi. So...moment of truth:

Is my sashimi glowing blue? Yes.

As you can see, they combined the spicy tuna roll (below) with the sashimi deluxe (above.) If you look at that you can't help but wonder...the fuck? What is all the random stuff doing near my sashimi? Sashimi is known for its simple and tasteful aesthetic. This seemed to go in a different direction. As you can see, the sashimi is on a bed of ice with a blue light underneath. I had to think this was part of the overwrought New York style of preparation. At 20 pieces of sashimi, $18 dollars is pretty much par for the course here in Gainesville in terms of cost. Some places give you more types of fish, but less of each fish. Personally, I prefer this a little better, as a bit more care seems put into it.

The spicy tuna was not very spicy in my opinion, but I tend to find it rarely is (even at good sushi restaurants.) The tuna though, was as it should be. It melted as trimmings from the tuna should. The rice had a good balance of vinegar. It was sticky without being overly sticky, which led to a pretty decent texture of the roll. Probably not the most exquisite spicy tuna I've had, but at 5 dollars it definitely exceeded expectations.

The sashimi was where the rubber met the road for me. There are two ways to tell the quality of fish before biting into it and that is the smell and how it looks. Thankfully, there was no smell, as that bodes really poorly for a sashimi dish. In fact, I think the ice bed for the sashimi was a clever inclusion to keep the fish tasting fresh through the whole meal as opposed to leaving it on a warming plate. You may hear that the best sushi chefs have somewhat cold hands. This was a pretty nifty way to maintain that bright and fresh flavor. If you're not a sashimi person, we have salmon, seared albacore, tuna, tilapia, and white tuna (escarole.) The first thing I'll say is that the cuts were excellent. I've been to other places (Dragonfly) that just mangle their sashimi. These sashimi cuts were superb. We'll go one by one. The Salmon was as good as Salmon in Florida basically can be. Salmon, as an oily fish, sometimes puts people off, but I found this salmon to be far more delicate than what I'm used to in Gainesville, which was the result of its freshness. It is somewhat remarkable being that it was probably sourced from the northeast. The seared albacore is a pretty common type of sashimi where they sear the outside and then cool it. This can be a dubious process for some sushi chefs because if the searing isn't done correctly, you'll either have a cut of fish that won't hold the sear particularly well, or it'll be actually cooked, which kills the raw flavor. This was a pretty nice version of this particular cut of sashimi, and the albacore flavor cut nicely through the sear. The tuna was of the Atlantic bluefin variety, extremely rare here in Gainesville where we normally have the yellowfin. If you have not had bluefin tuna, you are missing out something fierce. The flavor is more robust than the yellowfin variety I've had. Basically imagine the subtle flavors of the yellowfin and take them up a few notches. Granted, if I were in, say, Miami, I'd probably prefer the yellowfin because it would likely be locally sourced, but Gainesville is Gainesville, so if the salmon can withstand it's journey from the NE, apparently the bluefin tuna can as well. The Tilapia was more impressive for its cut than for its flavor. Tilapia tends to be one of the harder fishes to cut as they're pretty tough when raw, so you have to slice them pretty thinly to make work. The Chef did a pretty good job of it, but the flavor just wasn't quite there, likely dulled from the travel. The white tuna (also known as escarole) was excellent. Escarole has a bold flavor, as far as sashimi goes, but it is a delicately textured fish, so you can pretty easily mess it up if you go for the kind of slices the sushi chef was going for (it's not uncommon to see Escarole in larger sashimi chunks because it's delicate nature will hold up better to a larger cut.) The chef, barring the tilapia which should be thinner, was remarkably consistent across all his cuts as you can sort of see in the picture.


As good as the sashimi was (and it was better than the vast majority of what we see in Gainesville,) the hibachi was what I would consider a better value (and I don't even really like hibachi that much.) This whole thing was $16.

2 Salmon Filets? Hell yes.

So we have 4 components going on with this dish, so we gotta cover each one separately. The rice, despite its shape, was actually not very sticky, which was a pleasant surprised. It was pretty well seasoned too. It had a touch of crispiness, which I tend to like in my hibachi rice which means it was likely cooked on the grill and then formed into the shape. That bodes pretty well. The noodles were of a pretty simple variety. They weren't that heavily seasoned though. Mixing with the excess sauce from the salmon did the trick. The veg got the hibachi treatment as well getting cooked and sauced as well. The char was a bit lighter than I prefer when I get hibachi, but all the same, it was still pretty good. The most important part was the salmon though. Cooked a touch on the non skin side, and then largely cooked skin side down gave it a pretty solid flake. It was a touch overcooked from how I prefer it, as I tend to be a fan of the barely cooked salmon, but that tends to be how you get it at hibachi places unfortunately. For a simple, well done, Hibachi style dish, this delivered in a pretty solid way though. It's pretty no frills without egg for the rice and a lack of depth for the noodles, but if you're a hibachi fan, I'd say it gives a pretty good solid dish.

In order to try the nigiri, I returned to the restaurant to try their lunch menu. Their sushi special at ~$10 seemed like a reasonable price if the sushi was of quality with the dinner.

There were actually two more pieces of California Roll, but I ate them. The California roll was basically par for the course as far as California rolls go. The avocado was fresh, which is good, but the crab was of the fake crab stick variety that is the norm. The nigiri was well done. If anything, it was a little heavy on the fish side.

As you can see, the fish is a bit large for the rice underneath. That being said the fish was still fresh and well cut. This nigiri was made with yellow fin tuna instead of the blue fin tuna found in the sashimi (which is pretty common considering it's not just sashimi and is at lunch.) The rice was well done, but had a bit more body to it than is ideal and was a touch light on the vinegar side. All the same, the flavor balance was about right, and the lunch price certainly made it a good value.

In the end, I'd say this is probably one of the best Japanese places in Gainesville with comparative prices and superior quality with regards to most of the products put out by their competitors. Yamato edges the Hibachi in quality, but if you just want the Hibachi without the live show, this is the better option, and you can find roughly equivalent raw product with Ichiban. All the same, these guys actually seem dedicated to what they're making though, and that goes pretty far with me. If the location is more convenient for you than Ichiban or Yamato or you happen to want some of both, I'd say this is definitely the go to Japanese place.

Satchel's

Ask a UF alumni where they go when they're back in town, and they will, most likely, tell you to make the trip to Satchel's. Why? It seems more ineffable than anything. Sometimes it's because they only accept cash. Sometimes it's about the mini-hippy commune that seems to have sprung up in the back of the place. Sometimes you'll hear a person say they genuinely love a particular menu item, but usually it's more of a "Well, because it's Satchel's!" At this point, they tend to get all Jack Nicholson from The Shining on you and give you some crazy eyes.

I LOVE THEIR SALADS

Fair enough. Far be it from me to rain on your parade. Most of the talk you hear about Satchel's is the mystique surrounding Satchel's. Indeed, I feel compelled to not just stick to the food and mention some stuff because it bears mentioning. Satchel does a very good thing with his business. He treats his employees right. He's really involved/engaged with the community. He donates money he would have had to pay to credit card companies in fees to charity. He does what he can to really make sure you have a good experience. Does this mean he has a good restaurant, though? No. That means he runs an ethical business. Now, I'm sure people who want to support ethical business practices will be turned on by this (I think it's pretty cool,) but that doesn't mean the food is great. It's just the reality. Good food is good food and a strong sense of ethics doesn't make you a better chef. Now that that is all out of the way, let's get to the actual restaurant, eh?

My girlfriend and I arrived at Satchel's at 7 PM on a Saturday to meet with some friends there. I was already a bit apprehensive as 7 PM on Saturday is probably the busiest time of any restaurant. Shockingly, Satchel's was no expectation and the wait given was about 45-50 minutes. Well, I came all the way to NE 23rd so a wait less than a hour wasn't going to break my resolve to review it. Instead, I decided to wander about, checking out the locale. I quickly realized the main problem. This was Florida in mid July. Probably a poor move to have come at the most crowded time, as I don't particularly do well in hot and crowded areas. What was striking was the weird demographics of the place. While hippies were ever present as is the case with most local pizza places in Gainesville, there were families and students, wealthy and poor, old and young. Clearly, Satchel has tapped into something here, but what it is ain't exactly clear.

This album could be put on loop. No one would notice.

I shit you not, I saw a younger guy wearing a utilikilt without irony. Later, I saw a middle aged man wearing a Fleetwood Mac shirt without shame. Let's be real...there should be a little shame when you wear that. Not at Satchel's though. It's the warm, accepting embrace of Gainesville complete with the ever present hippies. I should say that I have no problems with this, as hippies are notoriously good pizza makers. One of my favorite pizzas of all time is made by the good folks at Taos Pizza Out Back in Taos, NM, which might as well be right out of a documentary about Woodstock (the one that didn't have Limp Bizkit headlining.) I'm usually pretty apprehensive if I enter a pizza place, and I can't spot Hippies or Italians. If I come across a Hippy Italian Pizza place, my expectations will be incredibly high. There's probably a marijuana joke in there.

Right behind the restaurant is a little shop filled with odds and ends that, I would guess, are to keep children entertained as you wait for your table. This is where I saw the utilikilt guy. They also have an area for someone to play music, so I'm sure if you came at the right time you'd probably get to hear a jam band laying down a crunchy groove, or whatever the hell they call it. They had a small bar area there as well with a selection of organic beer if that so interests you.

Normally,  I won't provide so much atmospheric color in a review, but I got bored 20 minutes into the 50 minute wait to get seated and started scribbling notes.

Eventually, our table was called. Luckily, the menu is there to explain why things take so long. Satchel's apparently has a small kitchen, which means that if the restaurant is crowded, you can wait as long as 50 minutes for your food. I have nothing against this, personally, but I will admit to having some confusion as pizza is supposed to be one of those types of food that can cook with extraordinary speed. I have no idea what they do to the pizza before they put it in the oven, but the prep, cooking, and serving of a pizza is a pretty quick process with the highly regarded original Neapolitan pizzas cooking in as little as 2 minutes in their special pizza ovens. Whatever though. If the food is good, it won't really matter anyway.

We decided to start out with a salad as my girlfriend basically demanded it. She had raved about the salad before, but I tried to keep my expectations in check. I didn't want to be unfair after all. At $6.50 to serve 2-4 people (as the menu recommended,) it chanced to be a good value at least.

As it turned out, it was in fact a very good deal, giving enough salad for my girlfriend, my buddy, and I. At about 2 dollars a person, a pretty good bed of red and green leaf lettuce, a basic vinaigrette, assorted nuts, diced tomatoes, some apple chunks, a healthy dusting of romano cheese, and a couple other slight touches made this a very good deal. I had heard that the salad was mixed with some form of addictive narcotic, but I felt like it was basically just a pretty good garden salad. I tend to find a fairly simple garden salad to have a pretty secure limit for what can be done with it and, therefore, a threshold regarding how good it can be before it is no longer a basic garden salad. This salad definitely hit the points necessary to be a good at what it was trying to be. It tasted fresh and the ingredient ratio was spot on as well.

The Calzones were described by the menu as "addictive," so I felt like I should include them in my review along with the pizza to come. At $12.50, I got the calzone called the Hot Rope, which came with spicy Italian sausage, green peppers, onions, ricotta, and mozzarella cheese. It came with a side of sauce as well.

The larger pictures is so you can see the sauce more easily.

The Calzone is easily enough for a full meal for one person. More likely being enough for one and a half meals. The ingredient ratio was good again. The balance was correct. The sauce was served on the side as opposed to inside the Calzone itself, which is neither here nor there for me. I tried the Calzone with and without it. Upon trying with the sauce, I came to my first qualm with the meal. The sauce they use is not very flavorful. I'd say that it's actually a bit bland. I first thought something might have been up when it came out in full blended form with remarkably uniform consistency. You can see some visible seasoning, but it just didn't have much punch to it. You will notice the crust looks strange for a normal calzone. This is actually the main thing I think Satchel's does best, but I'll get to that later. Overall, I'd say it's a little overpriced for what it delivers considering the sauce, but the calzone is well done, and I'd recommend it if you like calzones.

Finally, we come to the pizza. When I asked my friend what he liked best about Satchel's he responded, after a brief pause to consider, "The Pizza." Andy Hutchins over at the local UF sports blog Alligator Army is not shy about referring to it as the best pizza in Gainesville. But is it reallly? We got one of their "deal" pizzas: A medium 14" inch pizza with 4 toppings called "The Mama" for $18. This was a mixture of basil, sundried tomatoes, garlic, and their spicy sausage.

At about 1.25 a piece, they didn't skimp on the toppings

Thought you can't see it particularly well in this picture, the crust was of a similar type of the Calzone. What is it that gives in that particular color and body. Well, luckily, it's something I've seen and tasted before. This pizza used, at some point, a sourdough base. I don't think I've seen someone use a sourdough base for their dough here in Florida before. My taste for pizza is straight from San Francisco's Little Italy, and those places do this little trick pretty frequently as well to really add depth to the crust. This is apparently fairly common in the well regarded pizza places of New Haven, CT as well. Neapolitan pizzas are commonly made using this method. Personally, I'm a big fan. I'm tired of nearly every pizza place I eat in Florida being inspired by the usually insipid New Yorker bastardization of the Neapolitan style. To complete my pissing off the invariable descendent of a New York transplant, the Yankees suck, the weather there blows, and most of the city gives off a weird odor.

Moving on, I believe you can see in the picture that the pizza is drooping fairly substantially at the tip. Something is afoot:

Some color but no char. We can see the coloring is uneven as well. Near the center, we can see the dough is lighter, which means the pizza wasn't evenly cooked. I'm really curious to know how they cooked their pizza to get such an uneven bottom. One things for sure, it did not have a char, which really prevents this crust from being all star quality. We know they aren't using the brick ovens that get past 700 degrees to make, in my opinion, truly the greatest pizzas. All the same, the crust does have good flavor (even making that awesome crunchy sound of great sourdough bread.) I just wish the effort that had clearly gone into making the crust had been fulfilled on the cooking end.

The cheese was of good quality. It wasn't the ideal super fresh mozzarella you get at the better pizza places (ie: ones not in Gainesville,) but it certainly accomplished what it had to. The toppings were of decent quality though I do wish I had gotten a bit more of the sausage on the pizza considering how well stuffed with sausage the calzone was.

The big disappointment with this pizza was that it seemed like they used the same sauce that they used for the calzone. Pizza sauce can really add a ton to a pizza. Really, this seemed to add more of a slight tomato note with the liquidy texture instead of the more robust sauces I prefer. They likely could improve this sauce in any number of ways, but largely I just wish they would improve it to live up to the rest of the pizza.

At 18 dollars for a 4 topping 14" pizza, I'm sure some people are curious regarding the value. I've gone back and forth on this to be honest. I'm reticent to say that it isn't a good value because, honestly, it is the best pizza in Gainesville. Relatively speaking, they could probably charge more, and still make a killing. When you're the best in town, you're the best in town. Could a restaurant come along, take the same quality of crust, improve the cheese, sauce, and cooking of the pizza, and still make profit by charging less than Satchel's? As a person who is no stranger towards making pizza, I can see that as very doable. Granted, Satchel's goal isn't to bottom out prices as you can see what he does for his employees and they are still recovering from a kitchen fire that had them shut down for a while.

In the end, I have to recommend this place. It's basically that I have no choice. They have the best pizza in Gainesville, but being the best in Gainesville in restaurant terms means fairly little. As a result, it'll probably be a while before I visit the ATM and head to Satchel's again, but I do know, once I wait a hour and a half from arriving to having the food come out, I'll be able to eat the best pizza Gainesville has to offer.

-Charles

Recipe Rebuttal: Doing "TexMex" Right?

After trying Chuy's and discovering their moniker of being "TexMex," I decided that I still have no idea what that means. I feel like it's merely cementing the idea that people just don't want to call it "Super Americanized Mexican food," but I suppose that's a pretty long title for the Yelp directory. The reason I said in my first article that I err on the side of authentic is simply this: If someone is making authentic food, chances are it's because they really care about it and are going to do it right. That being said, you can put the same amount of effort and care into something that's inauthentic. It can still be delicious in its own right. I figured that it can't be that hard to Americanize Mexican food in ways that aren't just terrible. Hell, you Frenchify Vietnamese food and you can charge 30 dollars a plate. Must fusion food only be reserved for stuff the French can dominate?

Nay, says I. Mexican food can be Americanized without just being bland, gigantic portions of subpar ingredients covered in melted cheese.

My first ideas for what to make revolved around what the most Americanized Mexican dish already exists. The taco and burrito in their simple and authentic forms found in Mexico have been substantially altered to have all kinds of stuff here in the US. As a fan of the San Diego style fish taco, I find their authenticity being corrupted to be a veritable boon to the culinary world. That being said, the heart of both lies in Mexico. Nachos, though, seem almost designed for Americans. Frankly, we love loading stuff onto chips. Mexican totopos are the supposed original nacho, but the story of the nacho is similar to one of the Buffalo Chicken Wing. People come into a restaurant after it's closed and someone throws together what they have left, and it turns out awesome. The story goes that the original nachos were for visiting US soldiers anyway. If this is Mexico's gift to America, we should be legit in playing with it, no?

 I figured there were 3 components I must have for the dish to actually be considered nachos.

1. Chips. Hey, Mission Tortilla chips are on sale at Publix. Woo.
2. A pico de gallo salsa. This was more out of wanting to cleanse my palate from Chuy's crappy salsa.
3. A cheese sauce that was actually good.

From there, I decided to add some pinto and black beans to give the nachos a bit more body. Further, I decided I was going to make a green tomatilla sauce for pretty much the same reason I was going to make my own salsa. On top of that, I figured everyone loves guacomole and avocados were on sale at Publix, so there's no reason to pass up on those.

Conspicuous in its absence is something meaty. Just throwing some Mexican seasoned meat on there seemed almost to be missing the point of Americanizing it though. Something truly Americana must go on there. Then it came to me: BBQ. Now, every culture has their own form of cooking meat in the pit style. By BBQ, I mean the dry rubbed, slow cooked, sweet and savory style we developed here in the US. What meat though? Well...if I got pork I would probably just want to do carnitas and there goes my Americanization. I considered rib meat, but, frankly, I doubted my ability to de-rib the meat without just having ribs by themselves. Chicken was the solution. Pulling some dry rubbed chicken and mixing with some BBQ sauce would shred pretty nicely over some nachos. And what do you know, chicken quarters are on sale at Publix.

The key to a great BBQ flavor is the spice rub, and mine follow the pretty basic gambit. Here's my ratio.

1 salt
1 pepper
1 paprika
1 brown sugar
1/4 cumin
1 garlic powder
1 onion powder
1/4 mustard powder

I just mix these together in a bowl to give me the blend I need. Slow cooking chicken in just the dry rub would likely dry it out though. I needed to go wet on this. This could, in turn, double as my eventual sauce. In order to set this up, I added a can of chipotle peppers in the adobo sauce, apple cider vinegar, worsteshire sauce, and some limes that I just quartered squeezed, and dropped the remainder in the sauce. I rubbed the chicken down with my dry rub and nestled the chickens into their sauce.

This was a mistake. I used leg and thigh sections. I should have crisped the skin first before proceeding with this step. Oh well. Live and learn.

I proceeded to cover with foil and bake these for about 3 hours on 275, making sure to occasionally give them the flip around to make sure they didn't dry out. 3 hours later:

So I shredded them in the sauce. I noticed that I still had way too much sauce. I poured the excess into a pan, reduced it, and then poured it back in after thickening it up with some tomato paste and molasses to get the BBQ flavor. The chipotle pepper and paprika managed to bring enough smokey flavor that I didn't too bad about not having grilled these suckers.

What I didn't show is me skimming the fat, and using the non crispy chicken skin to rend off some more fat to cook the pinto and black beans in to get a nice flavor to those. In the end though, pinto and black beans will suck up whatever flavor you put on them, and the subtle flavors they brought were pretty good to add to their texture.

The protein base of my nachos were complete. Now I needed the accoutrement.

Tomatilla sauce requires, shockingly, whole tomatillas. La Aurora Latin Market will give you what you need in terms of tomatillas, but they do in fact sell them at Publix. La Aurora has some already stewed kinda like how they do for normal stewed tomatoes if you want to be lazy, but taking off the stems of a tomatilla isn't that hard. With some garlic, seranno pappers, and halved, destemmed tomatillas, I filled a pan partways with water, and let it all stew down until they were quite soft. You'll want just enough water as to stew all the stuff. Too much water and it just won't be as flavor dense. You'll want to season the water with salt, naturally.

I ended up adding some more water to the pan to help it stew. After the tomatillas started breaking up, I put it in a blender with a couple of avocados and blended it into a tomatilla sauce. The avocados cream up the sauce nicely. I added some pepper as well.

That's the consistency I like. It has some body, but it's mostly liquid. The avocado definitely does add some nice creaminess to it though. You like it thicker? Use less water.

The normal pico de gallo I make is pretty much what you'd expect. Tomatoes, red onion, jalapenos, cilantro, salt and pepper, and a little bit of olive oil. The ratio will all depend on your taste, but I try to build around the 1 red onion the most. I tend to use 1 red onion, 6 jalapenos, a quarter cup of diced cilantro, about 6 or 7 tomatoes. What kind of tomatoes? Whatever kind look the best. I like plum tomatoes best, all things equal because plum tomatoes have the least in the way of guts, which makes it more convenient for the next step, but there were some nice local tomatoes on sale, so those were the ones I used. You'll have to drain your diced tomatoes of the excess water in the guts of the tomato or you'll end up with something closer to Chuy's concoction. Just dice them and drain them in a colander while you do everything else. Giving it a bit of a shake in a large pot will help separate some of the seeds as well, which tends to be the bitter part of the tomatoes people who claim to not like tomatoes actually don't like. After being well drained, this is what I got:

Dice as thinly or thickly as you like. I like this thicker dice personally. Roughly the same size is better, but if you're not good at knife stuff, uneven cuts give your salsa character. At the very least, people will know it was done by hand. The white thing the salsa is in is actually my colander.  As you can see, the salsa is more stuff you find in a salsa and less standing water. For the best.

The nacho cheese sauce I use already had a video recipe from Chef John at FoodWishes (seriously, this dude is awesome):

Basically, you need a roux (basically the greatest sentence in the world of the culinary arts.) I like to go butter and flour where there's more butter than flour. Why? Well, it creates a looser sauce. Why not just add more milk? Well, that's another path too. White sauce is one of those things where you can kind of go your own way. It's more by sight than by anything else. Most importantly though, cook out that flour flavor. This means you got to be patient and even though that roux is bubbling away, just keep stirring away on medium and have faith it's not burning. The smell of roux is pretty clear when it's cooking. It smells like cooked pie crust. Just don't burn the stuff at a crazy high heat. Not that hard. Personally, I like a pretty loose sauce and cheese will thicken it up something fierce, so it's good to err on the side of looseness in my mind. Here's a picture of me incorporating my cheese into my very loose white sauce:

Yeah, it gets a bigger picture, so you can better see the cheese strands. That does eventually incorporate, so don't worry. Just make sure you use a good melty cheese. Cheddar, jack, or mexican cheese blends tend to be great at melting. Melted cheese is the dubstep of the culinary world. You can pour it over any damn thing, and it'll announce and dominate your dish in victory with its exuberance. This is the base of your nachos, so try not to mess it up.

Last, I had to make a guacomole. I just used 6 avocados, 2 tomatoes, salt and pepper, and some lime. If your avocados are ripe, they should form a guac pretty easily. Just let it set in the fridge with the lime juice on top with some plastic wrap pressed into it. After a hour or two, it should be awesome. You can add more stuff, but I had enough going on, so my guac was pretty simple this time.

Voltron-style, I combined all of this to make my Americanized Mexican Nachos that I was proud to call inauthentic because, hell, it was delicious.

 Little dab of sour cream hurts nobody.

From the side you can kind of see the layers. My shadow kind of fouls up the picture, but you should get the idea.

It hit the flavor pyramid. Spicy, salty, touch of sweet, and a touch of sour brought it all together into a nacho platter that I probably wouldn't want to waste on my friends when they come over for football season.


Normally, I wouldn't create a full recipe rebuttal to a restaurant I don't like, but, quoting from Chuy's mission statement:

Our commitment is to provide unique, authentic Mexican food to you using only the freshest ingredients.

Basically means they're asking for it.


-Charles

Greetings from Gainesville

Hi there. If you're reading this you've found my little food blog covering the city of Gainesville, FL, home of the University of Florida and ... well ... we honestly don't have much else. Gainesville is kind of the quintessential college town. Mostly everything here rotates around the University of Florida, and, due to its tremendous size, has created a pretty unique slice of Florida.

Well, that's what I've heard anyways. Despite having just crossed the barrier at having lived in Florida more than California, I'm still not entirely educated on the variety of peoples that occupy this state with most of my experience largely residing in Tampa and Gainesville. I am assured of their vast differences though, so I just sort of go with it and assume people aren't just messing with me. One thing is for sure, though — so many varieties of people have brought a variety of palettes and preferences in the food arena. Sometimes this results in some tremendous food. Most of the time, we get quite the opposite.

I feel I should probably explain who I am before we get to the food. You've probably already guessed that like pretty much every other person in this town, I came here for the university. In 2005, I decided to take my talents, Lebron-style, to the University of Florida College of Engineering (computer engineering to be specific.) Unlike most of my other engineering brethren that got the hell out of Gainesville upon graduating, I came to actually kind of like this town and decided to stay and continue my education. If you've met many engineers, you probably know that writing isn't exactly our forte. While I have no disdain for writing (I actually kind of enjoy it) I'm pretty sure all of those math classes have deteriorated my English. You'll probably have to bare with me through some grammar snafus at times.

With regards to my food history, I spent most of my early life in Hayward, California. It's a suburb of Oakland right across the bay from San Francisco. My parents, having grown up and spent most of their adults lives in California, had been raised with a taste for a wide variety of food, which they passed along to my sister and I. California, due to its size and highly variable climates, has nearly every kind of food come into season. When combined with some world class chefs, you basically have the perfect storm of all types of dining. The biggest culinary impact on me was the diversity of cuisines I got to experience. I grew up eating Indian-, Thai-, Japanese-, Italian-, Mexican- and Cantonese-style cuisine, usually in thoroughly authentic styles due to the cultural enclaves that were ever present throughout the bay area.

My dad got a job in the late 90s in another bay area though. We moved to the Tampa Bay Area. People will look at Tampa now and say, so what? Tampa isn't that much of a culinary wasteland. To some degree, I would agree. These days, you can pretty much find a decent place to fill nearly every food niche. In the late 90s and early 2000s, that was definitely not the case. In the mid 2000s though, things started to change. Tampa seemed to evolve and improve its food environment. If this was a Tampa food blog, I could probably just give a list of recommendations and move along.

This is not the case for Gainesville. Usually when I talk to people about food in Gainesville, they assume, not incorrectly, that Gainesville is loaded with crappy chains and half-assed restaurants that squeeze out as much profit as possible out of lowest common denominator of palettes. Don't take this the wrong way. I don't judge people for not having exquisite palettes. My palette was definitely not that great until I started cooking myself. As a result, I try not to judge people's opinion on food places that harshly. All the same, Yelp and Urbanspoon have largely lost all value to me as those are full of dubious reviews of places I've tried and hated. Their public reviewing system is open to all kinds of chicanery as well, so I usually have little in the way of trust.

In these terms, I'm not like some of the Gainesville food blogs you've seen which are little more than gushing over local businesses. I have no need or desire to blow smoke up the ass of any local restauranteur. To this end, I am a fan of Gainesville Eats Better, a pretty good food blog about Gainesville. Unlike the author there though, I am not a person who goes vegetarian very often. Will I talk about veg options? Occasionally. Is that my focus? Not really. I go for meat. To that end, if you are interested in vegan and vegetarian minded reviews of Gainesville restaurants, I suggest checking them out. They're pretty righteous.

So now that's all out of the way, I'll go over what I prefer for my dining experience. Rarely will I judge places by decor. Frankly, I don't care. I just don't. Second, I don't really care about service with a smile. Serving staffs are highly variable. One person can be great while another can be bad. It's just a challenge to review places based on the attentiveness on the staff. That being said, a particularly good or bad experience might get a mention. That will rarely shade my opinion of a restaurant though. Just being straight. I tend to be a pretty good patron. I tip well. I don't go off menu. I rarely go for substitutions. As a result, I very rarely have bad experiences.

The food is where the rubber hits the road. As I said, I'm a meat eater. Generally speaking, nearly every meal I order has meat involved in my entree. I will make exceptions for food where the attempt is not to substitute meat with some meat like substance, but the dish was designed to work, inherently, without meat (Indian food, especially.) I'm pretty adventurous as well, so I will try any kind of weird specialty I see on a menu if it strikes my mood. In general, I like to take the word of the serving staff/kitchen with regards to what their specialty items are. This will probably throw some people off, but I am a tremendous fan of spicy food. Generally speaking, my taste for spicy food began when I was very young — around 5 — as a result of my dad always ordering things spicy at Thai food, and I always wanted to try them too because they smelled so delicious. My longtime girlfriend has far more reasonable tastes with regards to spicy food, so I've come to appreciate more subtle spicing from our experiences with sharing or with my own cooking. Usually I just let this part go because people rarely assume that I actually want food as spicy as I tell them I like it. Many an entree at an Indian restaurant has been under spiced due to them thinking the white guy has no idea what he's getting into ordering it extra, extra, extra, extra hot. Being able to taste flavors through the heat has made my palette more sensitive as a result, so very spicy bland food will not fool me.

The other important thing that I should mention is that I love when restaurants deliver value. If you are an expensive restaurant but your food is worth it, I will be very pleased. If it's cheap, I expect the food to be fairly cheap in quality but still worth it. It's harder for restaurants to live up to a high price than a restaurant to live up to a low price. All the same, I will make it very clear if a bad restaurant is cheap but still not good for how cheap they are. I've been to enough food trucks to know that great food can be had/made on the cheap. If the restaurant is not providing value, either at a high or low price, I will immediately jump on that. No one wants to blow any amount of money on bad product. My baseline is simply this, you should provide more value than the various chain restaurants of Gainesville. Beating their prices and flavor simultaneously is doable, and whenever I hear restauranteurs claim it's not, they're bullshitting. It's true that most of the populous will not be able to tell the difference in the taste, but word of mouth is huge here in Gainesville and if you can provide a great meal at a good price, your business can succeed.

Speaking of which, I will not cover chain restaurants unless they are local chains. You know how they taste. I know how they taste. It's not worth wasting time. If the restaurant I'm reviewing doesn't beat them out, expect me to give them a pretty rough review. In general my equation is this: If a restaurant's (FoodQuality/Price) < Chain Restaurant, I will, invariably, not recommend them because, seriously, what's the point of supporting a bad restaurant? In my own small way, I will attempt to push people to the good places, but I have no desire to support the continuation of a place that does not deliver relative value.

Side note: When it comes to ethnic food, I err on the side of authenticity. Good, non-authentic ethnic food exists, but that tends to be the exception to the rule. The reality is that we're in Gainesville, so sometimes I'll take what I can get.

I'm not a professional critic, so a scoring system is largely pointless. Usually I'll either recommend a restaurant or not. I might throw up a Halfway one where there will be some mitigating factors that I will explain (Liquid Ginger falls under this category, which I'll get to eventually.)

As this is a foodie blog, and not just a dining blog, expect me to write some stuff regarding cooking as well as I love to cook. Gainesville, shockingly, has some excellent local farms that provide Grade-A stuff as well as the phenomenal grocery store known as Ward's. If something is in season and looks awesome, I'll likely clue you into it via pictures, recipes or videos.

So that's pretty much it. I hope you'll enjoy me sharing my food experiences around the city of Gainesville.

— Charles
I'll eat it, so you won't have to.

Chuy's Authentic Mexican Food; Gainesville

Since I am writing my first full review, I figured I should review a brand new restaurant to Gainesville called Chuy's. Much to my surprise when I entered said restaurant and was handed the menu, I discovered that Chuy's is, in fact, a regional chain of Tex Mex restaurants mostly found in the state of Texas. I said in my first post that my goal wasn't to review chain restaurants, but hell, we were there and ready to eat. To some degree, I'm rather surprised that a regional chain for Texas serving their regional variety of food would succeed when matched up against the existing cheap/good Mexican places already existing in the state of Texas. This restaurant is Chuy's first engagement in the Florida market, and they seem to have started with a bang. Nearly every time I go by, they seem to be getting a lot of business, which is definitely more than could what be said about TooJay's, the business that it is replacing.

I'll preface this by saying I didn't grow up with Tex Mex. I grew up with...California Mexican? My family on my mom's side owned a Mexican restaurant in the San Fernando valley in Los Angeles. As a result, I guess I never grew to like the Tex Mex style stuff you get here in Florida more commonly. It's not because of the Texas influence. It's because those places are usually pretty crappy in some ways. Bad quality ingredients, crappy cooking, and bland flavoring have combined to make me apprehensive whenever I encounter a Tex Mex place. Personally, I never understand the Texan influence when places claim to be Tex Mex anyway. What exactly is Texan about your Tex Mex? What I've heard is that Texans love to melt cheese on everything and fit beef into whatever they can. Sounds pretty Texan to me. All the same, I'm a fan of both melted cheese and cuts of steak, so I figure I should be amenable to someone doing that kind of thing right. Hell, I love chili con carne as much as any other American should, so let's get this show on the road.

I was once told by my uncle that you can immediately judge a Mexican restaurant by the salsa they bring out when you sit down. So...let's see what Chuy's offers:

Huh.

Yeah.

Well...I think that's all that needs to be said.

Alright, alright. A full review is what I promised, so a full review is what I shall give.

So, as you can see, we're not off to a great start with the salsa. There was a white foam from the tomato water on the other bowl of salsa as well. If their attempt was salsa fresca (the salsa of a diced variety,) perhaps they should have drained out some of the water. That's actually the better thing of salsa my table got as well. The other had foam covering the top from the clearly non drained tomatoes reacting to the lime. Speaking of the lime, it was fairly overpowering, and honestly, I'm surprised. With this super liquid form of salsa, there's no way to establish any form of quality control over your ingredient balance. Was it freshly made? I suppose at one point it was. Did it taste that way? Well, it reminded me of the "fresh" salsas you can buy at Publix in the produce section. A whole paragraph on salsa not enough? Oh, we're just getting started.

So one of the interesting things about this place is they had a nacho bar. Well...sort of. They had a bar set up where you can get chips, the salsa shown above, seasoned grown beef, refried beans, and queso. This was all included in the meal, apparently. I suppose the beef, beans, and queso were there to create your own nachos, and free is a pretty awesome price, so that's what we did.

As you can probably tell by the color and consistency, that queso is of the plasticy variety. You probably recognize it from your local grocer's chip and dip section. Adding the seasoned beef added a much needed element of flavor to the very bland queso. If you can't get past the "free queso" part, you probably don't care at all, but all the same, this came back with a vengeance. By the way, I'm not using hyperbole by comparing to what you get out of a tostito's queso jar. In terms of value though, quality over price with price at 0 means I can do very little bitching about this. Just know...not that good. On top of this, we got to sample some of their special sauces as well. The hatch green chilies were, shockingly, actual hatch green chilies. The only issue was that after being picked, likely canned, and shipped here to good ol' Gainesville, any flavor those things might have brought to the party in terms of quality was largely canceled out. Instead, I got some of the burn of the peppers without the underlying good flavors you get with the roasted green chiles you get at places that actually make a point to do it right. Not all that surprising considering New Mexico is all of 2500 miles away. And these are the problems you run into with chains. Instead of getting something that would actually be awesome for Gainesville because it's grown here, they attempt to try and make the green chilies thing work. It doesn't.

In order to get a good idea of what this place was all about, my table ran the gambit trying to get an idea of what this place could offer. I asked for their signature dish as well, attempting to ensure that they put their best foot forward to avoid any complaints of picking only the shitty things from their menu. In the end our order consisted of their Deluxe Quesadillas, their steak fajitas, and, their signature dish, The Elvis Presley Memorial Combo (an enchilada dish with three different types of enchilada.)

Deluxe Quesadillas:

So their quesadilla was actually 4 small quesadillas. I actually like this change. It allows for more quality control then the big monstrosities you get at other locals. As a result, this simple dish was the best thing we received. The chicken was dry and relatively unseasoned, but there were actually decent chunks of chicken, onion, and peppers mixed in with the cheese. The fry job on the quesadillas wasn't that bad either though the cheese could have been melted a bit more thoroughly. At 8 dollars, it seems fairly reasonable as well. Quesadillas are difficult to mess up too thoroughly and Chuy's did not do that. They could have done something with the chicken to make that add more than just existing as chicken, but I usually won't complain too much over going barebones with a quesadilla. Firefox telling me I spelled quesadilla wrong is the most irritating aspect about having gotten that dish. Oh, and the guacamole wasn't very good, but color me shocked on that one. I don't think I've ever seen a chain do a fresh guacamole well basically ever due to the challenge of working with non highly processed avocados.


Steak Fajita:

As you can see, this picture had to be taken longways. If you're a connoisseur of steak, it should jump out to you pretty quickly what is wrong with that steak.

1. Where's the crust or marks indicative of the Maillard Reaction found in the correct cooking of steak?
2. Why is the whole thing cooked through in the greyish color indicating well done?

Indeed, the flavor in this steak seems to all come from an overwhelming smokiness. Whether that was part of the marinade or involved in the cooking process, it's pretty clear with the end result. As a result of the cooking process it came out tender and dry. You would think someone would have shared with them the process of cooking food to allow it to be tender and moist. At around 15 dollars, this was the most expensive of what we tried.


The Elvis Presley Memorial Combo

You'll need to believe me when I say that I was prepared to lay into this dish to defend the good name of Elvis. I had a bunch of puns and such ready. It was going to be awesome. I was going to talk about how the Elvis tribute burgers actually are a tribute to Elvis's favorite kind of burger (peanut butter on a burger...go figure) while this seemed to just pay tribute to Elvis out of its sheer size, I suppose. Regretfully, I just don't have the energy to fight the good fight on this one. The combo actually came on two plates. I'll start with the bottom first. As you can see, it was a beef taco that came with two oversized tortilla chips with some of the queso poured on. The queso poured on was the same type of queso from the nacho bar, so I was not wholly psyched for those. As they sat for all of 1 minute while I took pictures of the above food, they cooled and congealed into some very close to rubber. Unlike an actual cheese queso that would have, upon cooling, become a delicious cheese spread, this felt more like glue stuck on the chip. The beef of the taco was not very well seasoned and was clearly cooked down to a substance with extremely little to offer in terms of meaty taste or texture.

The Enchilada platter had a bit more going on. The one pleasant surprise were the chunks of actual pinto beans in the refried beans. While the beans came on my plate at an (at best) lukewarm temperature, clearly having been scooped out of a large cooling pot before coming to my table, having the actual chunk of real beans gave it some body and let me know that these were, at one point in time, not just a processed glob but actual pinto beans. The rice was bland and largely unflavored. It felt like all they hit it with was a lot of salt, a tiny pinch of their Mexican seasoning, and some tomato paste to color it. The ranchero cheese enchilada was notable by attempting to make up for its lack of flavor with a ton of cheese. Being as their cheese wasn't bringing much flavor to the dish anyway, each bite was really just experiencing the texture of enchiladas. The beef TexMex enchilada had the feeling of being the tomato sauce of the Ranchero made slightly spicier with some of the ground beef previously talked about stuffed inside. The final enchilada had tomatilla sauce with chicken. Like the quesadilla, the chicken was relatively unseasoned and dry, mostly there to exist as just a texture rather than a flavor. The tomatilla sauce was, at the very least, something different, but it suffered from the same blandness of the other enchilada sauces. For $12.50 though, it was a ton of food.


In the end, the whole experience reminded me of why I don't want to review chain restaurants for this blog, and why, the vast majority of the time, I do not recommend them. They're all variations of the same tune largely. Even when you get something that throws down in defiance at being counted one amongst many, there are many, like Chuy's, that are expanding out to offer much of what we already have. Due to the specialized nature on this place, it might beat out the Chilis of the world by a hair in terms of value, but in terms of flavor it's right about on the even with those titans of Archer Road. It certainly doesn't beat out local places like La Tienda or Mexico Lindo. That being said, the restaurant was bustling upon exiting and leaving, so it's clearly striking a note with some people. Well, maybe they just like the unlimited free queso.

-Charles

Indian Cuisine

I feel sort of stupid typing out "Indian Cuisine" as the title for this post, as it could be talking about Indian Cuisine or the restaurant "Indian Cuisine." A preconceived immutable truth I had before encountering this restaurant was that Ethnic food places tend to try and capture the ethnicity of their food in the title of their restaurant. Looking at the Indian places in Tampa, you see places like Tunduree, Taj, Bombay Masala, and Udipi Cafe. Indian Cuisine on the other hand, just sounds like a generic placeholder for a restaurant name that is yet to come. Indian Cuisine would be the category on Yelp where you find this place. All the same, we have all of four Indian restaurants in the whole of Gainesville, so this one is going to get a shot. As Indian is probably one of my favorite types of food, I can be somewhat on edge when encountering inauthentic or poorly done Indian food. Before I get to the food though, there is something my fellow non Indian friends should be aware of. This article seeks to create clarity on this point first.

India is a big country. If you've looked at a map, you've probably realized that. Along with a billion people, India has a lot going on. As is normally the case with that kind of thing, the food will vary substantially as well. Most Indian food Americans are familiar with is of the North Western type from a region called Punjab, which nestles between India and Pakistan, southwest of Kashmir. Why? It's pretty simple. It's basically the closest to food we already have experience with. It's also a highly populated area with Delhi generally considered part of Punjab and a ton of people have emigrated from there. Interestingly enough, the Punjabi ethnicity is one of the closest ethnic groups to people of European descent. The coincidence unfolds in an interesting way when I explain the food. In any case Punjabi cuisine is probably best known for its savory dishes with large doses of cream and butter. In fact, one of the most popular Indian dishes we have in the US is called Murgh Makhani. Translated: Butter Chicken. That's tracking right there with the Paula Deen approach to cooking.

Westerners, as started by the British really, jumped all over Punjabi cuisine with its rich and exotic qualities. Michelin Star Chef Gordon Ramsay calls a type of Indian curry, tikka masala, one of the most popular dishes in Britain. As Indian people emigrated to the US, they spread their cuisine here as well, and it has caught hold with a lot of people. Of course, northern Indians were not the only ones to emigrate to the US. Realistically, people from all over India moved here, and many proceeded to set up restaurants.

We're getting to what will likely be a common theme of this blog. A very common thing in the US is that people from a country or continent on the Planet, no matter how huge, will make food from a region inside said country or continent that they don't actually know that well. The most common example of this is what we see with Asian food here in Gainesville. Chinese restaurants are run by Vietnamese and Korean immigrants, and vary rarely are the Chinese who serve these Cantonese inspired dishes from the Canton region. Similarly, I'm pretty sure the majority of sushi places here in Gainesville are actually run by Korean immigrants. That's not to say that these people can't learn to make the dishes they're creating, but it becomes pretty clear when you go to their restaurants and they have dishes from the type they're actually used to making, you see a huge difference in quality. Tucked away in some menus are gems from the chef's or owner's locality that they refuse to half ass because it's part of their culture.

Due to India's vast size, most of the people making Punjabi food in the US are probably not from the region. Usually they're just attempting to capitalize on what the average citizen desires. Sometimes they succeed and make it work. Sometimes they fail and put out food they really have shouldn't be when they could be putting out good food they actually know. If you want to know the trick for determining whether or not the Indian place you're eating at is truly into the Punjabi style, look to see how much fish they have on their menu. I don't mean that they just replaced chicken with shrimp (as is the case with most North Indian places,) but they have dishes that are specifically made to work best with the more delicate flavors of a fish. Coconuts tend to be more involved as well. Generally speaking, the dishes tend to be built in a far more rustic style compared to the sometimes overly rich Punjabi style dishes. It's no wonder Punjabi cuisine has won out in the minds of Americans and the British.

Personally, I've come to enjoy the merits of both. While the south Indian can be a bit more an acquired taste, depending on the dish, a good south Indian dish can still probably please the palette of a novice eater of Indian food. Oddly enough, Gainesville happens to have a South Indian place that does not seem overly reluctant to actually be South Indian, going so far as to have a section on their menu dedicated to South Indian cooking.

My actual reviews of Indian Cuisine, Kebab House, and Taj will be incoming over the next couple weeks.

-Charles