Geek Food Critic

I’ve mentioned before that when we end up being dissatisfied with a restaurant, we’ll give it six months, and try it again to see if things have improved. Mother Earth Meats is one of those places we’ve been giving a break for a while, but today after church, I asked my wife if she would mind giving them a second chance and she agreed it would be OK.

Mother Earth Meats is a market / butcher shop that specializes in grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, and other interesting meats and foods. They also have a small restaurant and bar inside, and since it is right down the street from our church in Farragut, it is convenient for lunch on Sunday. I prefer to eat higher quality meat when I can, and I especially like knowing that the hot dog we get for our son is grass-fed beef. I’d include a picture of it in this review, but my boy refused to let me take one of his today, and I know better than to get a toddler riled before we need him to eat.

My wife was considering ordering the Wings, which we know are awesome, but she realized she’d never ordered the Free-Range Chicken Tenders, so she tried those instead. She asked for mild buffalo wing sauce (they were out of the Garlic Parmesan she wanted) as a dipping sauce, but somehow that was translated into the tenders being covered in the sauce by the time they got to the table. She wished she’d ordered the wings, as the skin on the tenders was pretty tough. The meat itself was fine, but the skin, combined with it not being tenders she could dip in sauce, really made the meal not work for her. Our son did like the chicken, though, so there is that.

I ordered the Bison Burger, medium, with Pepper Jack cheese and bacon. My burger was excellent. The taste was fantastic, and getting it done medium was just right. Bison or Buffalo seem a bit lighter to me than regular beef, although since it is leaner, it’s important to not overcook it. I’ve had the grass-fed burger before and it is very good. The venison burger is no longer on the menu, but I tried it and it was great too. I have no use for turkey burgers and don’t care for lamb, so I’ll be sticking with the bison burger. At $10, it’s an expensive burger, but worth every penny.

The store was running a 50% off special on frozen meats, so I stocked up on several kinds of sausage - hot italian, andouille, kielbasa, and bratwurst. At 50% off, I was able to buy enough for at least 4 dinners for under $20. I also noticed some Reindeer Hot Dogs in the fresh counter, but at $15.99 per pound, I was hesitant to try them. I spoke to one of the employees and he said they tasted great, said they were shipped in from Alaska (via New Jersey, for some reason) - which added to the cost. That was good enough for me, so I bought four of them as well - two for me, and one each for my wife and son. I’ll be grilling them this week.

The service at Mother Earth Meats is OK. Our server was friendly and only had to be asked once to get a refill for my wife’s drink, and then she later made sure to ask if I needed one. At a place as basic as a lunch counter attached to a butcher shop, I don’t think you can ask for more. Our bill came to $29, and when you consider all of the meats were grass-fed or free-range, I’m fine with he cost.

I’m willing to recommend Mother Earth Meats and put them into our restaurant rotation again.

My wife had a bridal shower for a young woman at church to attend this Saturday morning, which left our son and I free to do whatever we wished for breakfast and lunch. Being the cool (and lazy) dad that I am, I made two quick decisions:

1. We would eat a single meal, not two. So brunch it would be.
2. We would most definitely go out to eat. Big surprise, right?

My wife mentioned our son had really enjoyed Waffle Hosue the last time she took him there when I was out of town for business, and that sounded like a good idea to me. After an extremely unusual morning of being allowed to sleep until almost 0900, we all got ready, jumped into different cars, and went our separate ways.

Saturday is Game Day in Knoxville, so I expected Waffle House to be packed with people wearing orange, and I was not disappointed. We don’t do much orange in our household, and besides, weekends are Superhero Days for us, so I was relieved to discover our opponents colors were red, as my boy and I walked in sporting our Green Lantern shirts. We arrived at the perfect time and were able to snag the next to last available booth.

My son ordered the Junior Waffle & Sausage, with peanut butter chips for the waffle. When it arrived, I received one of my infrequent reminders of just how much more work my wife does when it comes to raising our son, as I set out to portion off a quarter of his waffle at a time, butter it, pour syrup on it, and get it ready for him to eat. I’m pretty sure I’m less efficient at that than my wife, but he didn’t seem to mind. After downing more than half of his Apple Juice in just a few huge draws, he began devouring his waffle. This picture shows the second quarter waffle.

I ordered the All-Star Special. Waffle with PB, Eggs scrambled with cheese, Hash Browns, White Toast, and Crisp Bacon. By the time I finished preparing my son’s food I was hungry enough that I inhaled my waffle before remembering to take any pictures. The waffle was typical Waffle House fare - simply good, and probably the best quickly delivered waffle you’ll ever have. I wish I’d had more peanut butter, but I didn’t feel like waiting for it. Here’s a picture of my other plate containing eggs, hash browns, and bacon.

I realized when the food arrived that I hadn’t ordered the hash browns with any extra toppings. Slightly disappointed at first, I quickly recalled all the times that asking for them without using their special terms (scattered, covered, smothered, etc) resulted in me not getting what I wanted anyway, so plain turned out to be just fine. The bacon was awesome. You’d think it would be hard to screw up bacon, but if you thought that, you’d be very wrong. I continue to be amazed that the line cooks at Waffle House can turn out “crisp bacon” perfectly nearly every single time, while presumably higher paid cooks at much more expensive restaurants routinely get it wrong.

My son ended up putting away three quarters of his waffle before he declared he was, “all done.” Normally we’d sit and enjoy a few minutes of cartoons on his iPad, but there was a crowd standing all along the wall waiting to eat. So I wolfed the rest down, pointed out all the waiting folks to my son, asked him if we should get up so they could have our table and eat. He agreed that yes, that would be the nice thing to do. Little life lessons at the Waffle House.

I can’t say we eat at Waffle House very often, but when we do, we like it - especially our son. Highly recommended for fun breakfast.

As I’ve mentioned before, I like Mexican food. So when my wife suggested we try a place in West Knoxville we hadn’t tried for quite a while, I said yes. Meksiko Cantina may be spelled funny, but the food is OK and the environment is a bit eclectic. In fact, tonight was pretty unusual, especially for a Mexican place, as there was an accoustic trio/cover band, 3 Mile Smile, playing music.

I can be a harsh critic of music, and since I grew up in Nashville, I’m used to being able to find good live music any night of the week. I’m not a huge fan of purely accoustic music, so I was worried at first that I wouldn’t enjoy the show, but 3 Mike Smile grew on me thoughout the meal. I will say I’m not a fan of solo ukulele, though. What I was a huge fan of was seeing my son enjoy the music and really get into the applause after each song. He seemed quietly amused that everyone else was clapping, but he quickly joined in with gusto.

We started off with the House Dip. It was pretty good and so were the chips. The dip was good enough that I forgot to try the salsa. My wife an son split an order of chicken fajitas. There was enough left over when they were done to make me one and it was quite good, especially the peppers and onions.

I ordered something called Fourth Enchiladas, which was, perhaps obviously, comprised of four enchiladas. What wasn’t obvious to me until the dish arrived, was that it was just enchiladas, with no beans, rice, or other side dishes. At first I was concerned, especially that I hadn’t read the menu closely enough to notice, but the enchiladas were both very good and quite filling.

For dessert, my wife ordered Fried Ice Cream. It was odd. It came in a fried dough bowl, and it looked at first like it was inside a fried coating, but that was actually cinnamon. It wasn’t bad, with hot fudge sauce, but it also wasn’t that great. Would probably skip it next time.

I ordered the Churros. They were very good. I would definitely get them again.

I snapped another picture as we left the restaurant. A 98 on a health department inspection is pretty good, and that, in addition to the mostly good food, friendly service, and potential for live music again make Meksiko Cantina and easy for me to recommend it.

I’m going to start off this review a little differently by saying I simply cannot recommend Brixx Pizza in Turkey Creek. But first, to make up for the harsh story I’m going to tell later, I’m going to say some good things about the place.

Brixx has a practice of providing little kids with some pizza dough to play with when they arrive. They encourage the kids to mold it into something fun, then they bake it and return it to the table. We got to experience that for the first time tonight and it was a blast. Our son shaped his his dough into a T-Rex and his reaction after seeing it baked and puffy was almost worth all the crap we were to deal with later in our visit. I wish I’d had the forethought to take a picture of it or record a video of him playing with it, and laughing when I grabbed it and made the T-Rex “eat” his pasta or chicken, but I guess I was in dad mode then, just enjoying the moment, not nerd dad mode, recording it.

I’ll also say that the manager who brought us our food afer the third try as very polite and somewhat apologetic. Not apologetic enough to offer even a discount for the two screwups before that, but I didn’t go in there expecting a free meal and don’t feel cheated that I paid for what I (eventually) got to eat. Just seemed kinda … tacky, I guess, to not even make the offer.

So we started off with the Spinach and Artichoke Dip. It was OK. The bread was a bit tough, but the dip itself, especially with the tomatoes, was pretty good.

This is the pasta I ordered and finally received after two failed attempts - the Roasted Chicken Penne. The type of pasta we ordered is in the name of the dish. Let that sink in.

My wife and I both ordered this dish, and she even pointed to it on the menu, saying, “Roasted Chicken Penne.” I didn’t point, but clearly said, “I’ll also have the Roasted Chicken Penne” - and I asked if I could add meatballs to it. Why? I don’t know, I felt like having two different kinds of meat, I guess.

Here’s the exact wording of the menu item that we ordered.

Roasted Chicken Penne
Wood-roasted blackened chicken sautéed with sweet peppers, onions, cajun spices and gorgonzola cream sauce

So we were more than a little surprised, and for almost long enough for the server to walk away from our table after handing us our food, that what arrived was not a penne pasta dish, but a bowl full of angel hair pasta. I honestly wasn’t going to say anything because we were out with a toddler and I know, I just know, that the longer we stay at a restaurant, the more likely it is that we will have An Incident. But my wife reacted more quickly than I did and got the young lady’s attention and called her back to the table to tell her about the problem.

At this point, in hindsight, we may have made a mistake. We focused on the very clear fact that the pasta was wrong, and didn’t pay close enough attention to the rest of the dish. So we stressed to the server that this wasn’t what we ordered, and said we wanted penne pasta. She asked if we wanted them to be remade and we said no, we were OK with the toppings, but we didn’t like angel hair pasta, so we’d like them over penne. That was our second mistake, or perhaps a continuation of the first. She apologized and took the plates back to the kitchen.

After a couple of minutes, we realized that we’d seen mushrooms on the pasta, and the dishes we ordered didn’t come with mushrooms, and if they had, we would have asked for them to be held out. So we got the server’s attention and let her know that we thought the whole dish was wrong, and since I still had a menu on the table, I pointed to the Roasted Chicken Penne and told her that’s what we wanted, her’s with just chicken, mine with chicken and meatballs. The young lady looked a bit nervous at that point and, again, in hindsight, I’m pretty sure at this point she was considering her options. She could either run back and tell the kitchen crew to possibly toss out what they had been working on, or hope for the best. She choose poorly.

The second time we received our meal, it was obvious they had done just what we feared, and admittedly what we said was OK the first time - they put the mushroom-laden dish on top of penne pasta. And you know what - if there had just been a couple of normal mushrooms - the ones that are shaped kinda like clovers, I might have just shoved them to the side and eaten it. but it was filled with both those and some other slimy mushroom that looked more like thinly sliced sardines. I thought one was a piece of chicken and took a tentative bite of it, only to spit it out. Since somoene other than our server had handed the second try to us, we had to wait for her to come back so we could tell her it was still wrong. And this is where things really started to bother me, because I could just tell that she hadn’t told the kitchen to do anything differently after we’d caught our mistake, and she’d really rather we just shut up and eat the food. She even asked if we would like a side of the cajun sauce brought out and we said no. So she took the plates back, saying she’d see what they could do.

(I’ll just interject here that we eat out a lot, and while we have good nights and bad nights at nearly every restaurant we frequent, we have never had an experience like this. Not even close.)

After another bit of time passes, the manager appeared to deliver our food. As I said, he was very polite. He said he made sure personally that they prepared the right dish and we thanked him, and even apologized for the trouble, although both then and now, I don’t accept that we had anything to apologize for. We ordered a dish with the type of pasta we wanted in the name of the dish, and we pointed to it. Yes, we made a mistake in asking them to fix it, in our stunned confusion at being handed exactly the wrong thing, but all our server had to do to avoid the second failed attempt was walk back to the kitchen, admit to screwing it up the first time, and tell them clearly, “just throw that out - this is what they want.” Or maybe just blame it all on us - say we’re nuts or something. But she knew what we wanted, and she knew we’d ordered it to begin with, and she still tried to talk us into eating crap we didn’t like with a side of the sauce we actually wanted.

The pasta wasn’t bad, by the way. Good mix of onions, peppers, and cajun sauce. Meatballs weren’t anything to write home about and the chicken was tough.

So after all that, we ordered dessert, because I guess I both wanted to jack up the bill I was going to pay at a place I wouldn’t be visiting again, and because I wanted something nice to end my meal with. I got the higher bill anyway.

I ordered the Tiramisu, pictured above, and my wife and son split a S’Mores Pizza. I didn’t care for mine and what they ended up with looked terrible.

I don’t like writing this review. I really don’t like the fact that I had an experience that crummy. And I won’t be eating at Brixx again, no matter how cute that pizza dough T-Rex was.

I like spicy food. And by spicy, I don’t mean something you might taste and say, “Ah, that’s a little spicy.” I mean food that makes you break out in a sweat spicy. Remember the bald dudes from Fringe? That’s the kind of spicy I’m talking about. I’ve found habanero-based salsa at a couple of Mexican restaurants that was spicy enough to interest me, but typically I have to go to a Thai restaurant to get what I like. Then I just have to figure out how to convince them that I really do want it spicier/hotter than they normally serve American customers - even those who say they want it “Thai hot.”

One of the only places I’ve found in Knoxville that will satisfy my desire for spicy food is Kasume and Thai Cafe. I had to go throught he usual dance with them the first couple of visits - ordering it as high as their scale (1–5) goes, then asking for something “homemade” to make it spicier. Now they know me, so I just ask them to give me an 8 and the homemade chili oil/paste.

Today we had a new server, and she did something adorable when I asked for the homemade chili sauce. She brought me a bottle of Sriracha Sauce. Since I find that stuff to be barely spicier than ketchup, I asked one of the other servers who knows me to bring me the homemade chili sauce and to make sure my dish was an 8. She took good care of me.

We started off with our usual appetizer - the pot stickers. These are pretty good, especially with a bit of the homemade chili sauce tapped into them. Our toddler likes them too, albeit without the spicy sauce.

My wife and son split an order of the Orange Chicken. I’ve had a few bites of this and it’s the best version of this dish I’ve ever had - and one of the few examples I would bother to order if I weren’t in the mood for spicy food. I ordered my usual, the Cashew Nut Chicken, level 8. I usually mix it up well and then take a couple bytes out of the middle to see how spicy it is before I mix in the homemade chili sauce. It didn’t disappoint today, and I’d say it was probably hotter than most folks I know could tolerate even without the sauce, as it was pretty painful.

Some of my friends ask me why I like my food so spicy and I can’t really say I have a good answer besides I just like it that way. I’m not always in the mood for spicy food, and that’s probably a good thing. But today’s extravaganza of heat won’t have any lasting effect on me - heartburn or otherwise. But I really like eating food that’s spicy enough to make me sweat, and push me right to the point, or beyond, of wondering if I’ve found my limit.

Kasumi and Thai Cafe is a good place for tasty Chinese and spicy Thai food. I highly recommend it.

I used a phrase in a review I posted a couple days ago that seems to have caught at least one person’s eye - referring to a restuarant as “predictably decent.” I didn’t put much thought into the phrase at the time, other than to feel like it adequately described the consistent quality of the place.

But I’ve thought about it a little more since then and I think it would be fair to say a lot of the places I eat at regularly are predictably decent. Most have good days and bad days, but they all have one thing in common - I can count on them to mostly have good days. I like something very much about any restaurant I frequent, but more than good pizza or good soup or good wings, I like that I can count on the food and service to be good.

One place I can count on to be good across the board is Parkside Grill. We ate there Friday night after I returned from Nashville. We used to eat here more frequently both before our son was born and while he was still young enough to mostly sit in a carrier. Once he got a little older, we shifted our eating out habits to places that were a little less expensive, mainly because we both had to be ready to leave if he got out of hand in the toddler way and also because we realize the impact a crying baby can have on other people paying good money to eat at a restaurant.

We ordered our favorite appetizer, the Colossal Onion Rings. This an example of what I’d call predictably decent, although they were slightly disappointing compared to how they’ve been in the past. They were good onion rings, and a couple of them might have even been accurately described as large, but there was a time when they truly were colossal - to the point that my wife and I would order a half order and still have trouble finishing them. Nowadays the individual rings are smaller and there are fewer of them. They’re still quite tasty, but it might be time for a name change to something like, “Reasonably Large Order of Onion Rings.”

For my meal, I ordered the Kickin’ Chicken. The two fried chicken breasts were quite good, although I was only able to eat one and a half since my son wanted the rest. The cheddar mashed potatoes are a favorite and did not disappoint. The steamed broccoli was good - tender and buttery. The bacon gravy is the real star of the meal, and I get it on the side so I can control how much of it I eat during the meal and have enough left over at the end to dip some of Parkside’s good bread into. We skipped dessert this time, but if we’d stayed for it I probably would have ordered my usual, the Creme Brulee.

The service at Parkside is friendly and consistent. My drink never runs empty. The manager on duty makes regular rounds and checks on all the customers throughout their meals.

I like Parkside Grill and I can recommend it as a good place to have a good meal.

It’s funny what becoming a parent has done to our eating out habits. My wife and I have always eaten out, probably too much by the standards of many. That changed drastically right after our son was born, mainly because we were too tired to try to go out to eat and it was easier to just bring something home or fix something quick at home. But once our son was a few months old and had proven himself to be a mostly happy little boy, we settled back into our habit of eating out more often than not. Just not at all of the same places, as for quite a while we were pretty self-conscious about the rare but inevitable crying. Having been the couple without kids for so long who looked askance at whining children in a restaurant and wished they were elsewhere, I especially did not want to receive those looks. As the veteran parent of a toddler now, I mostly don’t care about those looks.

Our eating out habits have changed, though, and I find that we eat at many places I would have ignored years ago, for reasons I wouldn’t have understood or cared about then. We like places where kids eat free or at a reduced price, and especially places with kids menus that include foods we know for sure our son will eat.

One such place is Steak ’n Shake. We normally eat there on Sundays after church because kids eat free on Sundays (more about that later) and because it is somewhat on the way home from church. Steak n Shake presents itself as a 50’s style diner and its main dish is the “steak burger” with extremely thin crispy french fries. They also serve a large variety of milkshakes. While they aren’t my favorite milkshakes, their peanut butter banana milkshake is pretty good.

The steakburger patties are fairly small, so instead of the original double, I usually go for the triple with pepper jack cheese. Is it the best hamburger in town? No way. But it’s isn’t bad, and it’s cheap and typically served with a smile. My son usually gets a hot dog (no bun) and a side of mac & cheese. They used to have a side of mandarin oranges and he loved them, but they stopped carrying them.

The service at Steak n Shake is pretty good. Some of the servers are better than others, but none are what I’d call bad. In fact, the only thing I could say I’m dissatisfied with at Steak n Shake is the fact that, even though they promote Sunday as a day kids eat free, for the last year, every time we get our check, there’s a charge for my son’s meal. When I take it to the register to pay, I point it out and they take it off, citing a possible computer glitch. I make sure we get the deal, but I can’t help but wonder how many people don’t check their receipts.

Steak n Shake is a fairly regular stop for us and as will be for at least as long as our son can eat there for free, and probably after.

Barbeque.

That’s not a typo or mistake. I typed “barbeque” up there and left it on a line all by itself because it’s that important, that special to me.

Barbeque. At its most basic level, it’s about eating slow-cooked and smoked meat. No other food makes me feel more alive, more hungry, then more sated, and along the way more primitive, than barbeque. If I ever lost my mind and decided to move back to the surface of the Sun that is Texas, it would be for want of the barbeque I enjoyed while I was stationed there.

Sweet P’s Barbeque and Soul House is where I go for good barbeque in Knoxville. There are other places to get barbeque, and they’re all moderately tolerable, but compared to Sweet P’s, well… that’s why we drive out of our way to eat there. Sweet P’s is crazy popular, and if you’re going on the weekend, it’s best to plan on being there no later than 5PM unless you just enjoy standing in line and eating at the picnic tables outside. I hate lines and prefer air conditioning, so we arrive early.

Tonight we finally figured out the perfect combination of food to order for the three of us - my wife, our son, and myself. We ordered a pound of brisket, a pint of mac & cheese, and individual sides of cole slaw and potato salad. Rather than the random collections of this or that we normally order (with me always ordering brisket), my wife and son finally realized that simple brisket is the best of all of the good meats available at Sweet P’s.

Here’s a picture of a pound of Sweet P’s brisket.

And here’s a picture of the meal I put together tonight. Brisket, mac & cheese, slaw. The only thing that could have made this meal better was some Magners on draft over ice.

Aside from the amazing barbeque, Sweet P’s is a pretty basic place. The service at Sweet P’s is simple and friendly. You order your food cafeteria style, pay, get your own drinks, then sit down and eat. Sweet P’s name contains “and Soul House” but we never managed to catch the live music before our son was born and likely will not get the chance until he is a bit older. I heard a buddy of mine from Nashville came up this way not too long ago, possibly to play, so I hope we can find a way to catch the show there sooner rather than later.

I can’t recommend Sweet P’s highly enough. If you live in East Tennessee or are even just passing through, and you like good barbeque, pay them a visit.

Thursday is $5 Cheeseburger Special day at Blackhorse, so my coworker and I had lunch there today. Friday is Bacon Cheeseburger Soup day, so my family will be having dinner there yet again. I’m a creature of habits and patterns.

Blackhorse is one of my new favorite restaurants. I like it for lunch, I like it for dinner, and until just last week, I loved it for its high gravity hard cider (10.5%) even though, due to Tennessee’s insane liquor laws, Blackhorse could not sell to me in a growler to take home and enjoy. Unfortunately, last week they ran out of the cider and aren’t I don’t know when or if it’s coming back. Until then, I’ll have to be content with the food.

So what’s good at Blackhorse? Plenty. It’s burgers are great, although at $9–10 each, a tad pricey, which is why I prefer to grab one on Thursday for lunch. The Diablo is my favorite, because both the jalapeno and red onion relish and the peppercorn bacon pack a serious kick. The Cletus is great as well, with the combination of fried green tomatos and pimento cheese being quite tasty.

The Bacon Cheeseburger soup is amazing, and sometimes I just order a bowl of it with a side of mac & cheese (also great) or onion rings (great). Their pizzas are very good, especially the Heart Attack. They do a lunch special on either Tuesday or Wednesday with a personal sized pizza and salad for $8. On the appetizer front, the Beer Cheese Dip is very good, as are the Soft Pretzels.

Is there anything at Blackhorse I don’t like? Yes. The Chicken Nachos are terrible - we ordered them once and I’d say they had about 1/3 the amount of cheese they needed for the number of chips, and were otherwise boring. I ordered the Cajun Pasta and it was bland. Bland Cajun food is like unsweet tea - what’s the point?

One more thing I don’t like at Blackhorse - not getting a female server. The female servers, every single one that we’ve had, for lunch or dinner, has been great. And it isn’t just because I bring my adorable 2 year-old with me for dinner - they’re awesome at lunch as well. The male servers aren’t bad per se, they’re just nowhere near as good as the ladies - not even close. No offense, dudes, but simple things like keeping my drink refilled and remembering we asked for an extra spoon for the cute kid sitting next to my wife - those things matter, and they affect your tip.

But I can deal with a few of the dishes not being to my liking. And I’m not shy about asking to be seated in a section handled by one of the female servers. Other than that, I love Blackhorse Pub & Brewery,

One other purely personal note about Blackhorse. We’re a geek family, and one of the things we do on the weekend is dress in matching or complimentary superhero t-shirts. One Saturday after an afternoon at the Zoo, we walked into Blackhorse as the Green Lantern family. The hostess took one look at us and said, “You guys are the most awesome family I’ve ever seen.” Just another reason I keep going back.

I like Mexican food. I like it so much, I’m willing to settle for the mediocre Mexican food I can find in Knoxville. That’s what I did tonight - settle. Although I was also mildly surprised by a random special item on a whiteboard menu at El Mezcal Mexican Restaurant.

When I say the food at El Mezcal is mediocre, I don’t mean it’s bad, because it isn’t. The food at Taco Bell is bad. The food at Shoney’s is bad. The food at El Mezcal isn’t great, but it isn’t terrible and it’s reasonably inexpensive. We eat there when we have a hankering for Mexican food and don’t feel like dealing with the crowd and noise at Chuy’s (where the food is only slightly less mediocre, and more expensive). We decided to eat there tonight mainly because our regular Wednesday spot, a delightful taco shop named Oscar’s, wasn’t an option due to heavy traffic on the Strip and a lack of parking.

El Mezcal is like every other $10 or less per plate Mexican restaurant you may have tried. Chips and salsa, bean dip, fajitas with overdone tomatoes, oversize margaritas for the college kids, and thankfully, friendly staff. They’re especially friendly to us - a benefit of having a cute toddler at the table.

Tonight my wife ordered her usual - chicken fajitas to split with The Boy. I noticed the special of the day was Nachos Supremos, so I figured why not try something other than my usual - chicken chimichanga. I wish I hadn’t, as the nachos were a scattered mess of ground beef, which El Mezcal does not do well, shredded chicken, and a half pound of shredded lettuce over some chips, beans, cheese, and sour cream. I picked at my dish and left most of it uneaten, but I didn’t go hungry as my wife shared some of her fajitas with me.

I also ordered an unsual item I’d seen listed on the specials whiteboard - taco calimari. To be honest, I didn’t expect to get the best calimari in the world at a cheap Mexican restaurant in a land-locked state, but ordering it was worth it just to hear the “eww” from my wife. She and I have a 20 year old running joke about calimari, so I figured what the Hell. To my surprise, the calamari taco was pretty OK. Not great, but better than mediocre. It was fried, of course, and covered in enough pico de gallo to render the taste mostly moot, but the texture wasn’t super rubbery like most bad calamari. So I’d consider the meal a draw for me, and maybe more than that because our server was very attentive and kept new glasses of Diet Coke appearing whenever I came close to finishing mine.

I can’t give El Mezcal a strong endorsement, but you can do a lot worse for inexpensive Mexican in Knoxville.

One of my favorite lunch spots in Knoxville is Long’s Drug Store in Bearden. It’s close enough to campus for a quick lunch, and inexpensive enough that I don’t feel bad about ditching whatever I may have brought to the office that day when I get a hankering for a burger and tater tots.

Long’s has been around for quite a while, having opened in 1956. It’s a combination pharmacy, convenience store, and lunch counter. Long’s reminds me of a drug store I used to visit after school when I was in the seventh grade, and if it had a comic book rack, the similarity would be perfect. It’s extremely popular, so whether I’m eating there with my wife or a coworker, to avoid the rush and an inevitable wait, I shoot for an early lunch - arriving no later than 11:30.

While I typically order a bacon double cheeseburger, Long’s also makes a mean bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on toast. Either go well with tater tots. I believe they serve onion rings and maybe fries as well, but I don’t know why I would order either with expertly done tater tots available. If flavored sodas are your thing, you can get a fresh-made cherry Coke as well. Service is friendly if a bit slow at times, especially once the lunch crowd arrives in full.

The real star of the show at Long’s, however, and the reason we sometimes stop by after dinner at night, are the hand-dipped milkshakes. I’m sure they serve several flavors, but we always order the chocolate peanut butter. These are hands down the best milkshakes in Knoxville and some of the best I’ve ever had. Milk, chocholate ice cream, and peanut butter, mixed to a thick, creamy perfection. You know it’s a good milkshake when you can drink it through a straw, but only with a decent bit of work, or eat it with a spoon.

Give Long’s a shot for the decent cheeseburgers and tots, and come back for the milkshakes.

I don’t like to write negative reviews of restaurants - but I’m trying to write a post per day and we tried a new (to Knoxville) place last night and it was a mostly negative experience, so I’m going to be open about it.

Carolina Ale House recently opened a new location here in Knoxville. It’s fairly close to our house, so after a typically crummy Monday, we decided to give it a try after calling and finding out they were not running a wait at 5:30 after picking up our son from daycare. That a brand new restaurant in Knoxville wasn’t running a wait within a week or two of opening during dinnertime is unusual, and maybe should have tipped us off. Although to be fair, CAH (they fondly use this abbreviation on their menus) was packed when we arrived - but there were still quite a few open tables.

Upon seeing the menus, we realized we would have been better off coming on a Tuesday instead of a Monday, as Tuesday night is “kids eat for 99 cents” night. Lesson one learned. Still, we ordered our toddler the mac & cheese meal with fruit as a side, with chocolate milk. He approved of the chocolate milk, some of the fruit, and didn’t care for the mac & cheese. He loves mac & cheese, so I tried it and didn’t blame him for not liking it - the penne pasta was fine, but the cheese itself was bland and more of a cheese soup than cheese sauce.

My wife ordered a Diet Coke and I scanned the menu for cider. While CAH’s beer selection seemed impressive, or at least large, they only had three ciders on the menu - two Woodchuck variants in bottles and Angry Orchard on tap. Standard restaurant fare and a little disappointing for a place calling itself an ale house. Crispin, Original Sin, or especially Magners would have made me happier. To her credit, our server performed a convincing up-sell, noting for just a dollar fifty more, I could have a 22oz mug instead of the regular mug. I said sure. The 22oz overly sweet Angry Orchard was the highlight of the meal for me.

We began with an appetizer - the CAH Onion Strings. These weren’t bad, although they were served with an enormous side of ranch - 3 oz or more, and most of it went to waste. I wouldn’t order this again as it was what I think of as onion straws - mostly too thin to be satisfying, and by the time we got to the bottom of the bowl, too damp and greasy.

Rather than order two entrees, my wife and I decided to share the fish and chips and the appetizer sampler called the Picky Platter Combo. The PPC was composed of jumbo chicken wings, chicken tenders, Frickles (fried pickles), and mozzarella sticks. A brief comment about each member of the PPC:

<li>Jumbo Chicken Wings: Terrible.  Mostly dry wings dumped into a few ounces of sauce at one side of the platter, which of course spread onto the other food.  Frickles plus chicken wing sauce = suck.</li>
<li>Chicken Tenders: Not bad. If I'd gotten a plate full of these as an entree I wouldn't have hated them, but nor would I have ordered them again.</li>
<li>Frickles: Terrible.  My wife and I love fried pickles, but these were just off.  Having several of them soaked in wing sauce didn't help.</li>
<li>Mozzarrella sticks: Meh.  Standard mass-produced frozen mozzarella.  Boring and something I'd never order by itself unless they were hand dipped and fried.</li>

So the PPC was a serious let down.

The fish and chips were decent. 3 somewhat small pieces of fish, especially for the price. We went with fries and slaw as the sides and the fries were pretty good. The slaw was bad - too vinegary.

We hoped to salvage what was a poor meal by ordering dessert, with my wife letting me know she’d already decided what she’d want earlier - the Mud Pie. I read the description of the desserts and decided to go with it as well, mainly because I figured the Turtle Caramel Cheesecake would be as bad as every other cheesecake from a box. Since what I’m about to say about this dish will reference the description, let me quote it here.

CAH Mud Pie Hold on to your napkins!! It's a rich dark fudge brownie topped with vanilla ice cream & drizzled with caramel sauce & chocolate syrup. $5.49

Brownie, vanilla ice cream, drizzled with caramel sauce and chocolate syrup. Hard to screw that up, right? And indeed it would have been, if that’s what we’d been served. The brownie was OK. Ice cream is ice cream. Caramel and chocolate sauce - check. But both of our desserts were drowned in what someone must have thought was a decorative amount of cinnamon. And not just a sprinkling of cinnamon. A LOT of cinnamon. So much that one bite of the mud pie was so overwhelming it caused me to catch my breath and have trouble breathing.

We should have sent it back, but by that point we had a toddler who was losing his patience and we knew we had just a few minutes of peace left, so we asked for the check and left.

We eat at new restaurants quite often, and sometimes it is hard to get everything right during the first few weeks - we get that. We’ve often given a new place a second chance after six months or a year if it survives, and sometimes we’re pleasantly surprised. We hope to be surprised by the Carolina Ale House in Knoxville in the Spring of 2015. But I can’t recommend it for now.

It’s been way too long since my last post, and I think one reason for the gap is that, while I always have ideas for posts here at GFC, I never have (or make) the time to do what I really like to do - write a long, detailed review.  So I’m trying something different.  Here’s a quick review of a delightful new (to me) place to which I was introduced by a coworker this week.

I tried the Buttermilk Sky Pie Shop in Bearden this week.  In fact, after being taken there by a coworker during lunch, I returned with my wife and son after dinner that evening.  It was that good.

They sell pies, both 4” individual and 9” full-sized versions.  They also sell biscuits, although I didn’t sample any.  I may swing by on the way to the office one morning to pick up a batch of biscuits for breakfast for the office at some point, based on the quality of the pies alone.

The pies seem a tad pricey, but only a tad, and I didn’t mind at all given how good they were.  In fact, one peevish reviewer on Urbanspoon commented on the price being way too high and I think that’s nuts.  Do they cost more than buying something from the grocery store? Probably.  But they’re no more expensive than dessert at a decent restaurant, and less expensive than many.  4” pies are $4.25 each, 4 for $16, or a dozen for $42.  9” pies are $26.

At lunch, I had the Key Lime and my coworker had the Peanut Butter & Chocolate.  The Key Lime was delicious and likely what I’ll get from now on as it is my favorite kind of pie.  When I returned that evening with my family, we all had Peanut Butter & Chocolate.  It was very good, if not quite as awesome to my taste buds as the Key Lime.  Pics below.

If you’re looking for a delightful fresh-made dessert, I don’t think you can go wrong with Buttermilk Sky Pie Shop.