All posts in Food

I am a sand­wich guy. Love sand­wiches. I could live off of them for days and weeks given the oppor­tu­nity. I even like cre­at­ing new ways to make sand­wiches. Grilled chicken and spicy mus­tard on a grilled cheese com­prised of pro­volone and moz­zarella? Why not?

Jason’s Deli, Which Wich, chopped beef, sliced turkey with honey bar­be­cue, I love them. And if they were sen­tient and could feel love, they would love me too.

And so I was at Pot­belly Sand­wich Works the other day with Kim. I ordered the Pizza Sand­wich and she got the Turkey Skinny. I had to go back to the house so I took mine with me and she met a client. About twenty min­utes passes.

I eat the sand­wich when I get home.

Seri­ously? They call this a Pizza Sand­wich? Pep­per­oni, mari­nara sauce (who­ever put that on pizza?), provolone(again, who put that on pizza?), mush­rooms and Ital­ian sea­son­ing. Those are the ingre­di­ents that make up the vaunted “Pizza Sandwich”.

It was ter­ri­ble. Pos­si­bly the worst sand­wich I’ve ever bought at an estab­lish­ment that pur­ported to be a sand­wich shop. It didn’t taste like pizza, and it didn’t even taste good. It was like the bread was a wet sponge and the “pep­per­oni” (all two slices) was so low rent that it needed a bailout.

I talked to Kim later and told her the Pizza Sand­wich was ter­ri­ble. She imme­di­ately retorted, “My sand­wich was ter­ri­ble too!”

So good­bye and good rid­dance, Pot­belly Sand­wich Work. You’ve been in busi­ness for 32 years but hope­fully you’ll go out of busi­ness very soon and stop pol­lut­ing the world with your crummy “sandwiches”.

Last Sun­day Kim and I took the kids over to The Dixie House, a long­time estab­lished Dal­las restau­rant in the heart of the Lake­wood area. They were well known for their chicken-fried steak¹ back in the day, but then they got bought out by another restau­rant chain, The Black-eyed Pea and were amal­ga­mated into the fold, only retain­ing their name and lit­tle else. After adopt­ing the same menu as their new owner they lost much of their sig­na­ture char­ac­ter and they really became just another Black-eyed Pea.

Which is sad. For the past few years or so every time I’ve eaten at the Black-eyed Pea the ser­vice has been ter­ri­ble. The food is *okay*, I sup­pose, and since there are few restau­rants around that still serve the Southern-style food that most of us Tex­ans grew up on it was like a strange oasis in a sea of Asian fusion and Cal­i­for­nia Pizza Kitchen-type places. Like I said, the prob­lem is the ser­vice is ter­ri­ble. Sev­eral weeks ago we went in, again on a Sun­day, and were sat fairly quickly, but then our wait­ress, who looked like she was charged with seven or eight tables, came by and said she’d be right back to take our drink orders. Five min­utes, then ten min­utes passed, no wait­ress, no drink order. We even­tu­ally flagged the host­ess and asked if we could just have some water and rolls, since the kids were get­ting antsy and angry.

Ten more freak­ing min­utes passed and no wait­ress to take our order. And so we left.

Jump back to last Sun­day. We’re sit­ting at The Dixie House. It’s around 1:30 in the after­noon and there are prob­a­bly eight tables full and three of the wait staff to shep­hard over them. Our wait­ress came, said she’d be right back with our drinks. Another table is sat in her sec­tion, they order drinks and then get them before we get ours. Five more min­utes pass, no drinks. We finally flag down our wait­ress and ask where our drinks are and she stum­bles over what we’d ordered. She then gets them out. The food is alright but still the ser­vice is incred­i­bly lacking.

So we’ve made a pact: no more Black-eyed Pea. Ever.

We’re never going there again. I’ve wasted far too much money on a crummy estab­lish­ment. I’m done with them.

So if any­one reads this and has a sug­ges­tion of where to find this mys­te­ri­ously hard to find South­ern cui­sine in the Dal­las area, leave a com­ment. If it’s good we might even ask you to go with us sometime.

1. And don’t try to call it “country-fried steak”. That’s for wusses. [↩]

Oh, prepack­aged moist cookie made by Chips Ahoy, how I love thee.

But you ask, why do I love you so?

Because of your very name — “Chewy”. Through some sort of chem­i­cal process which, I’m sure, is bad for you, they (being Chips Ahoy) made a cookie that “tastes” like it was “freshly made”. The Chewy Chips Ahoy cookie is like the Easy Cheese of cookies.

But my lord, I love them. I hadn’t eaten them in 20 years, but out of the blue I ate one the other day at my in-laws’ house and before I knew it I had scarfed down 6 of them, which I’m sure short­ened my life by a cou­ple of months, but then to fur­ther put myself into an early grave I went out and bought my own bag of them to keep at work this morn­ing, hid­den away inside of my desk. I’ve had 3 already today, and in the name of C. Everett Koop, hope­fully that will be all of them that I eat today.

Chem­i­cally, the Chewy Chips Ahoy is far dif­fer­ent from the generic Chips Ahoy choco­late chip cookie, and within that maze of ingre­di­ents, I’m sure, is the rea­son that they retain their moisty qual­ity. Is it the palm oil? Or milk? Might it pos­si­bly be the molasses or the annatto extract? Only God, and the wizards/alchemists at Nabisco know. But I will tell them, as they ought to be aware, that they have made, for me at least, crack in cookie form.

Damn you, and I love you, Nabisco.