This may come as a mild shock to some of you but I’m a bit
of a, um, food snob. I’m not sure that’s
completely fair of me to say, though, considering where I live, which continues
to supply me with an onslaught of absolutely horrible and disgusting food. It’s gotten so bad at this point that I
absolutely refuse to eat anywhere around here again that I haven’t already
tried and “approved”. Yes, you read that
right; we actually keep a list of “approved” places to eat, and let me tell you
that the positive list doesn’t seem to grow while the negative ran out of room
a few years ago.
I live in Woodbury, Minnesota, where I’ve been for the past
10+ years, which is a suburb about 10 miles out of the Twin Cities. I’ve tried twice before to leave/move from
here and I’ll be trying once again very soon.
Due to this, I’m pretty much done trying any new food places around here,
both because I’m hoping not to be around here too much longer AND they seem to
be consistently disappointing.
For example, a new Ramen restaurant opened in our town not
too long ago and we were very excited to give it a try. Yelp! reviews claimed that it was
‘excellent’…we’ve since learned not to trust anything we read on Yelp! when it
comes to the MN palette. In any event, we
went, we ordered, and I was served ‘wet horse’.
Yes, you read that right…’wet horse’.
That was pretty much the only way to describe my vegetable ramen, a dish
that shouldn’t and probably didn’t have any meat in it. To further explain, have you ever been around
a horse? Okay, great, now imagine
dousing it with a hose for a while. If
you’ve ever done something like wash a dog with a hose, you probably know that
the dog hair takes on a certain weird, musty odor that’s even worse than what
the dog smelled like initially. Apply
that same logic to the horse and voila!
You’ve got ‘wet horse’, and that’s exactly what my vegetable ramen
smelled like. Appealing, huh? Needless to say, I couldn’t eat much of it
and it bears noting that I’m the kind of person that’ll usually eat almost
anything unless it’s completely inedible (which it was, in my opinion). Maybe all ramen dishes smell like ‘wet
horse’…who knows. If so, I think I’ll be
avoiding all of them because I strangely just haven’t acquired that taste as of
yet.
This wasn’t an isolated incident, though, and this sort of
thing has happened to us more times than I can count now. We ate at a Mexican restaurant in Minneapolis
that was rated “the best of…”. I ordered
a chili relleno and I kid you not…it was made who knows how many days earlier,
then frozen, and then put in the microwave right before being served to me. No joke.
How do I know? Well, they didn’t
microwave it long enough so parts of it were ice cold, just like when you
microwave something about 2-3 minutes shy of the necessary time. Plus, there was a puddle of water around the
food where the freezer burn ran off, not to mention that the food just looked
bizarre, like as if it was someone’s doggy bag from the previous week. Again, completely disgusting and
inedible. Oh, and did I mention that the
salsa in the salsa bar was rancid? The
onions had definitely gone off. This was
vomit city.
The latest, though, is something totally new that I can’t
recall experiencing previously anywhere.
We decided to try an Italian place in Woodbury for pasta. We usually drive close to 15 miles to Pizza
Luce whenever we want pasta and just bring it home but we thought we’d change
it up a bit and try something in our neighborhood. I knew from the start this was a bad idea, I
mean seriously, I did. Well, it didn’t
fail to disappoint my disappointment. I
ordered the cheese ravioli and really wanted marinara sauce on it. Being a vegetarian, I have to sort of drill
wait staff about their food sometimes and this one sort of paid off. I asked, “Is the red sauce marinara or meat
sauce?” The young girl replied,
“Marinara,” and I was just about to order it when she paused and said, “We cook
our meatballs in the sauce but then we pull them out.” I hope you’re following the logic there. It’s still marinara...not meat sauce…because
they pulled the meatballs out.
Brilliant! Um, no, not really. Therefore, I had to order their only other option
which was alfredo.
The food arrived and I kid you not…it was jarred alfredo
sauce. No, I’m not making that up. We went to a restaurant and paid upwards of
$10 for someone in the “kitchen” to open a jar of Ragu, Bertoli, whatever, and
they poured that on the ravioli. How do
I know? Simple – you can just taste the
preservatives in it, see the funky texture, and as someone who refuses to make
food at home with jarred sauce, I sure as hell don’t want it in a
restaurant! The irony is that we didn’t
want to cook that night so instead we paid someone else to also NOT cook. Crazy.
This is my life, folks...what can I tell you. I’m just not sure how much more of this I can
take, quite frankly. Geesh.
And so, the next time you order food out, you may want to
inquire a bit about what you’re eating.
If not, you just might end up with a wet horse drenched in Ragu, and if
that doesn’t make you sick just thinking about it, well, you should eat around
our neighborhood because it might be right up your alley!
