Geek Food Critic

I’ll tell you all you need to know about Chandler’s Deli in this first sentence - they make hands-down the best fried chicken, and the best macaroni & cheese in Knoxville. If you haven’t eaten there and you’re reading this while they’re open, stop reading and go get some chicken - I’ll wait.

I had lunch and Chandler’s recently with a buddy from work. It’s best to arrive early, and that day there were only a couple of available tables around 11:30. Chandler’s is in an old Taco Bell building, and you order your food cafeteria style. We started off with fried pickles. They were very good - with just the right amount of breading.

I ordered fried chicken, macaronic & cheese, and fried okra. The okra was very good. A couple of guys ahead of me in line were trying to decide on which side to get, and I told them the macaroni & cheese was “drive across the state good.” They took my advice and ordered it. I’m glad I did as well. The real star of this meal, though, was the fried chicken. Chandler’s fried chicken is awesome. It’s juicy and fried just right, and has been every single time I’ve had it.

I’ve only ever tried the fried chicken at Chandler’s. I know they have other main dishes available, but I’m a fan sticking to what I know is awesome. I only let myself eat at Chandler’s once a month or so, because I know if I let it become a habit, I’d be there every week, then multiple times per week, then pretty soon I’d have a heart attack. I’ll say it again - if you haven’t tried Chandler’s fried chicken, you need to.

One of my favorite restaurants in Knoxville is a little burger joint called We’re Cooking All American Grill. We came across it in a shopping center on North Peters road soon after it opened in early 2010 and just fell in love with the place. At first we were simply pleased by the quality of the simple food and the intriguing story of how the Polish immigrant came to America. Over time, we grew more impressed with how hard this guy worked, how well we ran his business, and how consistently good the food was, visit after visit. Once our son was old enough to eat grown-up food, we found another reason to love We’re Cooking - kids eat free there Mon-Wed. If we don’t hit We’re Cooking on Monday night for dinner, we usually make up for it on Saturday for lunch, and some weeks we do both.

For lunch on Saturday, my son got his usual - the kid’s hotdog without the bun, although he got fries this time instead of fruit. I took a picture of it but it was too blurry to post because he couldn’t keep his hands away from it. I’ve had the hotdog before and it’s very good, even if my son does do the unthinkable and eat it with ketchup. At least I’ve convinced him to sometimes go for mayo instead or in addition to the gross red stuff.

My wife ordered the Fourth of a Cow with fries. We’re Cooking sells a single, double, and triple burger, with the other variants being Half of a Cow and Most of a Cow. The burgers are outstanding, so much so that I could eat them every visit, and likely every day, and never grow tired of them until the inevitable heart attack came. I sometimes order my Half without a bun. The fries are a good, if fairly standard, crinkle variety.

I went for my current usual, the Boom Boom Seafood Tacos, although I had them make them fish only by leaving off the shrimp. The seafood is fried, and the fish comes in roughly large shrimp sized chunks. It’s flaky and fresh-tasting, although living in a land-locked state ensures it must have been frozen. I like the boom boom sauce quite a bit, although I believe it is likely just a mix of hot sauce and mayo. I typically avoid the fries because I like to kid myself into believing the onion rings are not as bad for me since they aren’t potatoes.

Today’s visit was just like nearly every other visit - awesome. The food was good. We had to wipe our table off when we sat down but we grabbed a booth literally right after someone was left, so the staff wouldn’t have had time to clean it anyway. Cleaning is something the staff does a lot at We’re Cooking. It’s obvious the owner drills it into his employees - because they’re doing it all the time. That really stands out as fairly unique, especially for a “fast food” restaurant, and it has to contribute to the regular perfect scores We’re Cooking gets on its health inspections. I eat out a lot, and while 90’s aren’t that uncommon for the good places, 100’s are pretty rare, and We’re Cooking gets them quite often.

I can’t say enough good things about We’re Cooking. The food is great. The service is great. The owner isn’t around as often these days as he used to be, but I figure that’s because he’s managing his growing franchise business and actually enjoying the fruit of his many years of hard work. He’s a fascinating guy to talk to, and trust me when I say you won’t find a more pro-America business owner than a Polish immigrant who left Poland to get away from Communism. He never ceases to say something awesome while we’re talking at the register or around the restaurant - offering parenting advice the other day to me when he said my son looked like he was a good boy. I laughed and said, “Well, he’s a good boy sometimes.” He told me boys could only be good some of the time, and the rest of the time, we should just let them be boys. As a former boy myself, I’m OK with that.

If you’re looking for a great burger or a good pair of fish tacos, or just about anything else they have on the menu, give We’re Cooking a shot. You won’t be disappointed.

If you’d like the short version of this review, Hard Knox Pizzeria makes some of the most interesting and delicious pizza I’ve ever had, the service is friendly and fast, and except for one thing, I would work the place into our restaurant rotation. As it stands, however, I have absolutely no intention of eating there again.

My team at work recently celebrated the birthday of one of our coworkers. Given a choice of where to eat, she chose Hard Knox. My primary concern was whether we could fit our whole team at a few tables, so I left a bit early and we managed to put three tables together to make room for everyone. Everyone else arrived and ordered just before the lunch crowd arrived.

I’ll tell you, right off the bat, I was pleased with the service. The young lady who took our order was friendly and cute. I asked her for a recommendation for a good pizza with white sauce, and she gave me one. Once everyone was seated, she even brought out a pepperoni pizza for the group to sample while we waited for our pizzas to be prepared. That’s pretty nice. The pepperoni pizza was very good, albeit not exactly what I’m looking for in a plain pepperoni pizza. What I mean by that is if I’m just getting pepperoni, I’d rather have a deep dish pizza to make it a little more interesting, and Hard Knox pizza is a thin, wood-fired crust. Delicious - just a little on the plain side.

Realizing I wanted something a little more interesting, I happily accepted the young lady’s recommendation for the Great White Hope. Pesto cream sauce, mozzarella, marinated chicken, shaved parmesan, crushed red pepper, and extra virgin olive oil. Sure, it’s what I call “frou-frou” pizza, but it’s delicious. You can tell they use fresh ingredients all the way around. The crust may have been a tad bit too thin towards the center of the pizza, forcing me to eat the first couple of bites with a fork (sorry, Jon Stewart) so the toppings didn’t slide off the too thin crust at the point of the slices. My coworker got the Bonecrusher, but with white sauce. It was very good, but if I had it to do over again (which I won’t), I’d get the Great White Hope.

So if I liked the service and the pizza so much, why do I have no intention of eating there again? Two reasons, and they’re both tied to a choice the owner of Hard Knox made in furnishing the restaurant. I didn’t take this picture of the stools in the restaurant, but it’s close enough for you to get the idea.

If you want to eat in the restaurant, that stool is your only option. I absolutely understand that the owner is going for a boxing theme, both on the menu and with the decor in his shop. I get it. It’s even kinda cute, visually. But it’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. So reason number one - comfort. I’m a big guy, and frankly, I am not comfortable sitting on a little stool while eating my meal. I don’t sit on a stool at work. I don’t sit on a stool at home. Hell, I don’t sit on stools in bars unless they have backs because they’re not comfortable. I was reminded of my only other visit to Hard Knox when I arrived early this time and setup the tables. I made sure I got a seat on the side of the tables with my back to the wall, so I would at least have some back support. That’s exactly how I had to sit after a few minutes during our first visit, only that time, since we were seated at a single table, not a row of them turned sideways, I got to lean against the wall looking like a dufus since my wife was sitting across the table at a 90 degree angle from me, along with our son in his baby carrier.

Which brings me to reason two - we have a two year old. We always ask for a booth when we eat out. Are we in love with booths? Not really. But you know what a booth allows us to do? Put our son on the inside next to his mom so we don’t have to worry about him waxing toddler for 20 seconds and tearing through the restaurant. Even a chair would be better because we could block him in against the wall. But a stool with no back that would let him just swing around and hop right off the back? No way.

Am I making too big a deal of this? Maybe, but I’m just being honest. I don’t care that the guy who owns Hard Knox wants to have stools instead of chairs, for whatever reason. I have tons of places happy to take my money for food, so I’ll continue to choose one in which I can sit comfortably, and also one in which I don’t have to worry about our son sliding off a stool and running around wreaking havoc.

If you’re someone who can sit on a tiny stool while eating your meal and you’re looking for amazing and interesting pizza, I can heartily recommend Hard Knox Pizzeria. If you like to be comfortable while eating, may I suggest Blackhorse just next door? Or if you’re really in the mood for a pizza place, give Sergeant Pepperoni’s a try - it’s just down the street.

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.