Bloomington/Normal Day 1: Flat Top

For work, I was sent to Bloomington with my family.  This meant that while my wife had meetings, I was allowed to take our two kids someplace and keep them busy.  The last time I had gone to Bloomington, was about last year or so for the same reasons.  Anyhow, on the first day, we were looking for dinner and decided to try out the restaurant right next door to our hotel, on Tonawanda Avenue.  The restaurant was called Destihl and we walked in, asked for a seat for 5 and then the hostess asked if we had a reservation.  I had said "no" and then she told me that they only take reservations and without a reservation it would be about an hour till we could have a table. 

A personal peeve of mine, is when a restaurant hostess or seater tells me that there is a wait and then you look around yourself and see 3 or 4 booths open that could sit 2-4 each, and a large table/booth against the wall that could seat 6.  We will call that table/booth combo "Spot A", because it will become important later on.  So, we left and walked just across the street to a place that looks like a steak house, called FlatTop.

FlatTop is an interesting place.  It is so interesting that it could work in other cities, like Saint Louis.  You walk in, get a table and then order.  Their special item is a food bowl, prepared on a giant flat top and then delivered to your table. 

So, what happens is that you grab a long wooden sign on a post and write your name on the sign.  Then you go up to the very large bar where they have all kinds of rices, noodles, vegetables and meats and pick your stuff that goes into your bowl.

Not only did they have everything labeled nicely, but behind this bar, on the wall, they had a whole sign describing the calories of each prepared item or sauce along with the spicy level.  So, you fill your bowl up and then take it to the bar surrounding the cooks.  There you can make any last minute changes, like turn your bowl into a soup or a salad.  Whichever change you make, you place a colored plastic stick into your food, so that the cooks know how you want it prepared.  So, they cook it, and get it to you just as you had ordered it.

I would give the place, atmosphere, food and everything else a 3 out of 5 stars.  The only issue we had with it was that since the flat top cooking area was a certain size and they have a lot of vegetables and things that appear to be raw, it takes a lot of time to get everything cooked.  Since it is the only cooking method of the food there, it is possible that you may have your bowl at the cook's bar, ready to be cooked, fr as much as 5-15 minutes before there is a space on the cook-top to cook it.  I went back for seconds after the first bowl was finished within 2-3 minutes.  The second bowl sat there, waiting and waiting and after it was delivered to me, the rest of my table had eaten and was ready to go. I would give the service as far as the cooking is concerned, maybe a 2 and 1/2 stars out of 5.  Someone has to know that this is a problem and they need to be thinking of solutions.


http://www.flattopgrill.com/locations.html

Audience Particpation Needed

My wife thought of doing something fun, you, the reader, get to participate in a fun game.  I describe my experience and you get to give your own thoughts and review this restaurant.  Are you ready?  Here we go.

So, we went to a regular restaurant in Columbia.  Jonny's Pizza has been open since May of 2011.  We haven't been there yet as it seems to always be closed on Mondays and closed at most times when we have free time.  We finally got in and after waiting a few minutes for a booth to be cleared, my wife and two kids had a spot. 

This is the inside of this pizza place?  Bland walls, white trim, black booths and fake hardwood flooring.  The chairs are normal, cheap metal frame chairs and the tables are basic black with laminate tops.  So, this restaurant says that it is famous for their Chicago style pizza, and happy that it is the only one in the area that serves it.  So, since this is my "choose your own adventure" or "make your own review" post, I'll skip my opinions further-on.  So, we order a few things.  We ordered a small pizza, the "meatlovers" which has sausage, hamburger, pepperoni and Canadian bacon.  The pizza was $11.50.  This is what came:

The pizza was hand-tossed, freshly made crust, with a tad of that yeast flavoring in it, a sweet sauce and all of those items on it.  The cheese made strings when you pull it showing how elastic it is and the sausage was a bit spicy, full flavored and perfectly cooked.  If this was your pizza, what would you give it?

Next we also had some bread sticks ordered.

 The bread sticks and dipping sauce consisted of a frozen bread stick which was heated in the pizza oven.  You could and can still see the black burn marks from the rack inside of the pizza oven.  All the bread sticks were the same size, shape and flavor.  All were chewy within 20 minutes.  This was $3.95.  The sauce is what they call, their "special sauce".  By special, I believe it means that it was canned spaghetti sauce with a cup of sugar added.  So sweet, in fact, that it was moving away from the savory side and towards the sweet side.  What would you give this one?

My wife wanted to try something different and her and I being close enough to St. Louis, where I'm originally from, and having had many times, St. Louis style Mostaccioli, we were expecting something more like the heaping, heavy amounts of Mostaccioli noodles with a thick sauce over and mixed around them, complete with big pieces of onions.  Well, what was delivered was this:

So, if you ordered Mostaccioli and received this, what would you rate it?  This is the same sauce, as the pizza and the bread stick dipping sauce.  This is the overly sweet sauce.  This was $7.75.

Next was the salad, the above pasta dish came with a small salad.  They call it a "dinner salad" and they mention that it is made with iceberg lettuce, olives, cucumber and tomato.   This is what it looked like:

The original salad, as plated before we started to eat, had 2 olives, one slice of cucumber and one tomato.  It also has a Fat Free Ranch that was so acidic that it could strip paint off of a tank.  (Probably not my opinion or an exaggeration there.)  What would give this salad?

I have saved the best for last.  We ordered the Hawaiian Chicago style pizza. This is what it looked like:

This is a small Chicago style Hawaiian pizza, going for $11.95.  This pizza had a layer of bottom crust, a layer of toppings and then a layer of cheese on top where a large puddle of that same sweet sauce was poured.  The sauce on the top of the pizza was not only cool, but also, about a 4th of an inch thick.  The inside of a slice looks like this:

The pizza had a crust that was mushy and wet and soggy.  The ham was diced and not fully cooked.  It was simple ham, nothing special about it.  The crust and dough tasted like pineapple, which could have been explained by the obviously canned pineapple chunks thrown into the pizza pie.  The water and juice from the pineapple had caused the dough and crust to be mushy and soggy so that it was hard to eat this pizza.  Chicago style pizza has a hard crust on the bottom and sides, not soggy and wet.  In the very bottom of the picture, in the middle shows something that looks like a white rectangle.  That item is a piece of raw onion.  Onions were used in this pizza and none of them, not a single one, was cooked.  They were raw still and so raw, that they still had the tart, sour flavor.  The chunks of onion and ham had made small indentations and spots in the bottom layer of cheese, which could indicate that they cooked the bottom layer with the cheese on it, then threw the ham and onions on to cook on top, then threw the pineapple and then finished the top layer.  The canned pineapple would have added enough moisture to soak the cooked food underneath it, as is evident by this picture of liquid, not sauce, liquid on the pizza pan.

The silvery color on the right of the picture is the pan and that other color is the water, just liquid coming from the pizza pie.  Again, there wasn't a bite that didn't have wet crust, raw onions, or cold sauce on top.  So, what would give a pizza like this?

My wife's suggestion was that as a local business, I wouldn't have to trash it when I review it, only give an honest and truthful experience and leave it up to the reader to make their own decisions.  So, I hope you came up with your stars, out of 5, in each category for this restaurant.  I will only input this statement, this fact: my family and I will never be coming back to this place. 

Thanks for playing!

I am stuffed...EVERYONE, GO TO THE NOODLES & COMPANY!!!!!!

Okay, here is the deal, as told to us by Kate, one of the managers at the South County location of the Noodles & Company, no money is spent on billboards, commercials or other advertising and they basically get customers from word of mouth.  So, I thought of it as a bit of a coincidence that me business card from this magazine, gets picked to win me and 5 other people a free tasting.  But, I'll go along with it.

So, we arrived last night, just in time and the 5 of us sat down.  I had my family, my wife, two kids, and her cousin, Franco.  We sat down to what we all thought would be just a few dishes, small portions for us to try as this whole thing was free.  However, as Kate told us, they would be bringing us regular sized portions, and a lot of them, so we better be hungry.  Well, Franco had stated that he wished I told him this so he could have skipped lunch.

First up, Kate brought out some pot stickers and a spinach salad.  The pot stickers tasted like they had a nice mild spicy chicken flavor inside and were just the right crunchy on the outside.  They went best with this dipping sauce, which was like soy sauce mixed with red pepper flakes and something else tasty.  The sauce was good enough that if we had shot glasses, we would have taken them all in unison.

   
The spinach salad was reminiscent of all other greatly executed spinach salads with a warm bacon dressing.  This one was a bit different because the tart flavor was due to some balsamic vinegar and to cut that were some freshly cut strawberries.  You tasted, spinach, bacon, vinegar and strawberries and sometimes the flavors were all at once and created a complex flavor symphony.

Okay, so what made this such a good start, was also the fact that Kate, may have been smarter than the average bear.  She noticed that we had brought in two kids with us, my 3 and 5 year old.  She may have noticed that they were acting a bit, well, like a 3 year old and a 5 year old boy does.  So, she also brought out  a dish of the regular mac & cheese as well as a dish of the buttered noodles.

The mac & cheese is a winner, every time we come to this place.  We always order a dish and split it between my two boys.  It is regular elbow macaroni with a cheese sauce and shredded cheese on top of that. We also had the buttered noodles.

The buttered noodles is mostly what I get.  I do like trying new things, but after a long week on a Friday night, which is usually when we get to the mall and go out to eat, I feel like just eating some simple comfort food.  The buttered noodles dish is simply wide egg noodles served in butter with some salty Parmesan cheese.  It is so simple, but I love it.

So, when we start to make our way through that first round, Kate talks to us about the first section of food: Asian.  She talks to us and stresses that all dishes are cooked to order, can be made custom, and made from the freshest ingredients.  She started off with bringing out the Indonesian Peanut Saute' and the Thai Curry Soup, which is one we requested that we wished to try.

The Indonesian Peanut Saute' was spicy and nice.  It is listed as the most spicy item on the whole menu and the 3 of us, adults, loved it.  It had a nice Asian flavor to it and as you eat it, it gets better and better.  Then when you finish it.  You think to yourself, where is the spice?  And then it hits you.  Spicy enough to make your nose run, and to make you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but not too spicy.

The Thai Curry Soup was next and we are always a bit paranoid about other places serving Thai food.  We do, after all, live within 3 miles from the best Thai restaurant in the St. Louis metropolitan area: Thai House.  The soup had that nice and spicy yellow curry flavor in the broth, loads of vegetables and a few noodles.  It was like an Asian version of a noodle soup.  It was very nice.

Alright, so it is at this time that the three of us, announce that we are full.  But Kate doesn't hear us, or pretends to not to, and she keeps on bringing us delicious and delightful dishes.  The next dish was The Med Salad, which is your Mediterranean salad, using Romaine, greens, tomatoes, red onion and such with a yogurt dressing and feta cheese.  What a tasty salad, it tasted like a salad that you would find in your best Italian restaurants.

To go along with this, also from the Mediterranean menu, was the Pasta Fresca, which was a very Italian inspired pasta.  It had a nice mix of vegetables as well.

So, we are making our way now, filling our stomachs even further and the Whole Grain Tuscan Linguine comes out.  It is tasty, as you can taste the difference in the pasta flavor, being a whole grain instead of a white starch, complete with some Parmesan-crusted chicken on top.  It was tasty and the crust on the chicken was very good.

I know what you are thinking, we have to be blowing up at this point.  It is also at this point that Kate tells us some wonderful and unexpected news: we can take home all the food we don't finish.  All this time, my wife and I were thinking that this was just like any other free tasting in which they would take back anything  we didn't finish.  We were wrong as Kate brought out a stack of to-go boxes and we started to fill them up.  This was awesome, not only we were getting a feast fit for a king, at no cost with a manager being our personal server and guide, but we got to keep all of it as well.  Hail to the king, baby.

Kate comes out with the final nail, the last punch and the two dishes left that completely ruined us.  The first one out from the American menu selection was a Chili Mac & Cheese.  This mac & cheese had a spicy chili on top of it as well.

The second dish that they gave us was an instant winner: Truffle Mac & Cheese.  Many years ago when I started watching Food Network television, I became interested in truffles and eventually tried them and loved them.  A quick stop at Whole Foods where I purchased truffle oil quickly spring boarded me onto the truffle bandwagon.  My wife and I were using that truffle infused oil for everything from stir fry to popcorn.  I love the taste of truffles and this restaurant does the same thing.  The Truffle Mac & Cheese is made by basically cooking everything with truffle oil.  Even the mushrooms, I believe they were procini mushrooms, Kate may have said, were cooked in the truffle oil so it tasted as if they were each truffles.

Now is the part of the tasting that I had just about everything boxed up and we are all finished, filled to the brim.  Just then our new friend Kate shows up with another tray of food, this time, as sandwiches.  She brought us The Med Duo which has chicken and tons of vegetables with a Med dressing.

We also had another kind of sandwich on that same plate.  The second one was the Wisconsin Cheesesteak Duo, which I didn't get a bite but everyone else was very happy with.  We are full, beyond full and our bellies are in pain with so much good food.  Just when we thought it was over, it almost was.  Next was dessert.  What? Really?  Kate really expects us to eat anything else?  I had food that was comparable in taste and satisfaction as some expensive restaurants in town.  Kate comes out with dessert and my 5 year old's jaw hits the floor.  A selection of giant cookies and rice krispy treats large enough to use as bricks for a castle.

Let me tell you now, that the only thing which I did not try on this table was the Wisconsin Cheesesteak Duo sandwich.  I tried a little bite of everything else and was happy with everything. The great thing about the Noodles & Company is that their prices are extremely reasonable, with most of those noodle dishes being less than $6 even as a regular bowl which is normally just $5.39.  This is a lot of food for such a small price and by the silence at our table, for most of the tasting, the mac & cheese dishes should keep your kids calm and quiet.

Thanks to the Noodles & Company staff for keeping up with us and thanks to Kate for taking care of us.  Thanks also to the store manager, Alex Cedeno for contacting me and setting this all up and for having us.  It was our first tasting experience anywhere and it was quite a very good evening.   If any of these pictures looked good or tasty, please go over to the Noodles & Company at the South County Mall, or wherever one is near you and go in.