Eating Out Rogue Festival

Our own internationally famous Rogue Festival is about to kick off this Thursday.  And we're doing our part by make sure to sleaze our way into the booths and tables of the unsuspecting Tower eating establishments to leave them in complete disarray.  Covered and smothered in a film of crumbs and mysterious viscous fluids.


For the performers and volunteers of the festival, the work has already begun.  The setting up of venues, the plastering of flyers, online promotion blitzes.  Final rehearsals, tweaking costumes and art projects and itineraries of which shows are a must-see.  And speaking of a show that you simply must see, I must shamelessly plug and pander to friend of the blog Captain Scurvy's Apocalypse Hoedown Revival

Vaudevillian humor and miracle alchemical healings.  Chills!  Thrills!  And absolute abject terror!  Guaranteed to make Bob Hope roll in his grave every time you see it!  So go see it!

Pandering over.  Back to our regularly scheduled snark.  We kick off Eating Out Rogue Festival by doing what we do best.  Getting drunk!  So we're off to the The Sequoia Brewing Company for some beers and some snacks.

Sequoia is a more recent incarnation of the beloved Butterfield's brewpub.  As I understand it, along with the business, Sequoia also bought Butterfield's recipes.  I was always a fan of the tower dark, but I'm more in a refreshing beer kind of mood.  So I order their German kolsh, called the Sequoia Gold.  It's pretty damn good!  It's got the lightness of a pilsner, but the bitterness is mellowed to a mild afternote.  The flavor is almost sweet, just teasing that line from the dark Munich malt.  I loved it and will certainly wind up regretting drinking plenty more.

The last 2 minutes of the USA vs. Canada hockey match was on, so we were decidedly distracted during the ordering process as we cheered the tying goal.  Poor thing, she dealt with our sophomoric bellowing in stride.  Our group ordered: potato skins, chicken fried steak, green salad, sausage plate appetizer (a re-tread of a Butterfield's favorite) and garlic fries. 

The food arrived in good time.  Especially given how busy it was on a Sunday afternoon.  The potato skins appeared fairly average.  Not exactly artful presentation, but they had fairly generous toppings.  The chicken fried steak didn't really appear to be anything special.  By appearance alone it seemed to be a pre-formed and breaded frozen patty tossed in a fryer.  However the sweet potato fries that came with it were quite good.  They come with a rather tasty aioli.  The salad was salad.  Pre-mix with bottled dressing, croutons and a few raisins.  Nothing to write home about, but adequate.

Now we come to my old favorite.  Once upon a time, this plate introduced me to amazing and wonderful sausages I had never tried.  And it allowed me to try each as an individual, similar to a cheese platter or beer sampler.  Not any more.  What I got was a red, greasey mess of muddled flavors.  The plate is supposed to come with andouille, italian and bratwurst sausages.  With all the brick colored grease, it's obvious that they've thrown all of the sliced sausages in to fry together with the onions and jalepenos.  Sadly, this results in a poorly muddled mess that, while edible, does nothing to enhance the enjoyment of a good sausage.  The fries were all right, with a dusting of parmesan and parsley, though lacking in any real garlic flavor.  I'll address the real outrage next.

Prices!  Oh my god!  This is the most lopsided menu I have ever seen in my life!  Eight dollars for french fries?  NINE for fried pickles?!?  What planet are we on, where two of the cheapest ingredients around can run you just as much as an entree?  It's fucking potatoes and pickles!!!  A burger is a buck fifty more and it COMES WITH FRIES!  I'll concede that the food is edible, even tasty in some instances.  But if I'm paying entree prices for some damn french fries there had better be some sort of magical theater or art applied to them.  Send out a crying mime to weep over my empty wallet.  Instead of ranch, send them out with some lidocaine booty butter lubricant so we don't need butt doughnuts to sit down after we get the check.  Tickle my no-no's!  Something!

All in all, Sequoia is a fine brewery that still serves cold and tasty beer.  As a restaurant though, they need to make a decision to smarten up their menu as well as their presentation.  The sausages were a mess, the chicken fried steak was an embarassment and the price gouging for seasoned fries was outright astounding.  If you're peckish, their chips and salsa are only two bucks.  Is nothing complimentary any more?  Sheesh!  The dinner menu appears a little more on the reasonable side, but the appetizers just aren't worth what you pay.  So, you might want to toast your friends on a full stomach.

-Pook

Eating Out a Mad Duck

So recently I’ve been reading up on the local restaurant news and this new spot called The Mad Duck came to my attention. Since they’re still in the building stage, I can’t really review the place. But I can go on a non-sequetarian rant about the menu. Join us won’t you?


Now, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m quite the curmudgeon. So my first inclination was to look at tearing apart their cookie cutter menu. The Duck is a burger and sandwich joint, in function not much different from a Red Robin. So naturally I’m digging through looking for the same old same old. And there are some commonly found plates. Caesar and Cobb salads, hot wings, bleu cheese burgers and the like. But I also found some interesting and even intriguing dishes surrounding them.


First off there was a beet salad. I don’t know if it will sell since most people put beets alongside brussel sprouts as fiberous culinary poison. But it’s certainly a bold choice for a very picky town. There’s a duck prosciutto salad that looks interesting, if for no other reason than it’s hard as hell to find many dishes in town that use it. Their appetizers vary between the familiar, the gimmicky, the bizarre and the hopefully awesome. Wings, sweet potato fries, familiar. Fried pickles and buffalo chicken dip, gimmicky. Warm soft pretzel…bizarre. Wait, what’s this? Baked brie, pulled pork sliders and devilled eggs. Wait, DEVILLED EGGS? Hell yes! I know they’re simple to make at home, but talk about comfort food. I don’t know if it’s a bold, maverick choice. Or, if it’s a brilliant stroke of marketing to reach out to the common man and say “Heck man, we ain’t no dang ole high falutin’ snooty type ‘Beestro’! We’s just like y’all. Devilled egg?”.


Burgers are burgers. In my opinion the most avant garde thing a cook can do with a burger is cook it properly. The lulu burger is somewhat interesting since it incorporates lamb. But hardly a new item for Fresno. But the sandwiches again diverge from the usual fare. Sure, there’s a steak sandwich and a pulled pork. Then you see the spicy shrimp stuffed baguette, the fried egg and bacon sandwich and a grilled brie and ham sandwich. Grilled brie and ham?? I’m getting fatter just thinking about it. I like this. Dessert is pleasantly simple. Bread pudding or cupcakes. Obviously dessert isn’t going to be their stock and trade. And I think that’s a very good thing for their entrées.


So, naturally I expect the prices to be through the roof at this point. The prices on their online menu are small and really difficult to read. Missing in a couple categories as well. But when my poor old eyes finally focus enough to find them, I was outright shocked! They were reasonable. There’s no dollar menu, but their prices are well below what I expected for the food they are offering. Salads between $5 and $10. Appetizers between $4 and $10 (fries only $2!). Burgers run between $6 to $9, which is in general, a lot for a hamburger. But, heck Carl’s Jr.’s prices have crept into that range. The prices for their sandwiches and premium burgers are still yet to be published on their website, but I daresay that I’m thinking that they will be reasonable as well.


Overall, I’m cautiously hopeful about The Mad Duck serving good food and if so, having a good shot at making it in Fresno. We will of course forgive them for having the audacity to be north of Shaw and the general poor taste to be located in Clovis. Being in Old Town off of Pollasky and 5th Street (that’s Bullard to us Fresnans) is, I suppose, an adequate concession.


And so we wish you luck you psychotic canard, you unbalanced mallard, you cracked up quacker. Expect Eating Out Fresno to beat a path to your door when you open. Here’s a prayer that your food can live up to my vastly overblown expectations. I really don’t want it to turn out like that one time I played ping pong with a porn star. High expectations, with a dreadfully painful letdown at the end. Who would have thought that Ron Jeremy was that good at ping pong?


-Pook

A Tale of Cinnamon Buns and Spooge

I swear I have been trying to get into a position where I can have something non-snarky to say about local Fresno food. There IS great food out there. I’ve just been luckless and lazy in my culinary pursuits. And drunk. Very, very drunk.

And that brings us to The Cinnamon Roll Shoppe. Another long standing Fresno institution. They have been at their location on Fresno and Gettysburg as long as I can remember. Easily 30 years. And I have some very wonderful memories of stumbling into their lobby after a 10 or 12 hour drinking marathon to grab a hot nut-roll to stagger home with and devour before passing out, upright in my chair, with a nutty cinnamon sugar cascade running down my chin, like I died from a baker’s heroin overdose. Good memories of what was a great pastry.


Alas, my memories were to be betrayed in a most foul fashion. It was 8 in the morning and I was dragged unhappily out of my booze cocoon for an early morning adventure. In the midst of this, I realize that I’m actually awake and outside during the short period the Cinnamon Roll Shoppe is open and serving! Mmmm, hot buttery cinnamon roll with nuts baby! And so we duck in, that I might purchase my heart’s delight. And alas, he says that they’re out of nut rolls… How the hell? Do you have walnuts? Then throw some of the damn things on a regular cinnamon roll! Normally I’d say it, but this poor, portly, baker had that aura of praying for just the right excuse to throw himself into a running mixer, ending his cinnamon pain forever.


So, I settle for a regular non-nutty roll and proceed to drag it back to the cave to be devoured with extreme prejudice. It’s a good thing too. If I had tried to eat what I found in the box, in front of this semi-suicidal chef de patisserie, I’d have sent him into the bathroom to smother himself to death with the very dough that has destroyed his will to live. I didn’t want to be an accessory or anything.


I have eaten many cinnamon rolls from many sources. Sealed plastic bags from vending machines, kiosks in malls operated by slope browed teenagers, fabulously fresh baked at the county fair. But never in my life has a roll been this gut churningly disgusting.

How in the hell did they make the cinnamon and butter filling have the honest to god consistency of male ejaculate? And I mean for real real. This isn’t allegory. If you went to the sperm bank and picked up a six pack, then mixed it with sugar and cinnamon, you would have the quivering, gelatinous, stringy substance that drenched this poor piece of pastry. Still, I paid 3 dollars for this damn thing. I’ve got to try to get something in my roiling booze soaked guts. So I’ve little choice but to dive in, subconsciously hearing dozens of old gay friends laughing their asses off. It’s after two bites, when my friend can no longer hold in his howls of laughter, loudly declaring that, with my mustache a-drape with stringy, quivering brown goo, I appear like the victim of an unfortunate felching accident.

Ok, forget this. This isn’t food, this a gag. Like rubber dog doo. Or that god awful scene in Van Wilder with the éclairs. Barring the unlikely, but possible option that the baker was slathering the dough with his hate paste, that due to rising prices and falling profits, The Cinnamon Roll Shoppe has had to alter their recipe to include corn syrup or other, cheaper sweetener. Maybe even taking butter right out of the filling. It’s outright gross.


The bakery fresh cinnamon roll is supposed to be a little bready, with the wonderfully caramelized tops and hot, buttery, cinnamon sugar melted around the bottom. They’re not gooey, not covered in cream cheese frosting. Nuts. Pecans or walnuts. That’s the only allowable topping. When cinnamon rolls are ALL that you do, you simply must put out the best possible product. And believe me, I love the Cinnamon Roll Shoppe! That’s the very reason for my shock and disgust. I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that they know how to put out a higher quality product. If times are hard, I would rather pay more for a superlative product than pay the same for awful quality.


So take a note from the Pillsbury Dough Boy and cheer up fatty! Go to the store, buy some butter and some sugar and some cinnamon. Dig around in the back, find the old recipe, the old pans and if required, the old owner. But whatever you do, stop serving food that is awash in a slimy, viscous fluid that cannot be discerned from sperm in any way but odor. If you must bow to convention, then just make some damn icing and sell it on the side. But I beg you, for the health of your business and my own general wish to be able to say something nice about a beloved Fresno institution, get your shit together!


-Pook