Worst. Salad. Ever.
Last week, my better half and I went to Cafe Maude to see what all the hooplah's about. Because I am sadly lacking in trendiness, I only made it there after winning a gift certificate to the place from work. I was nevertheless enthused. The reviews had been glowing. The place, I'd heard, is always packed. And hell, I'd even met one of the owners once, and he seemed like a swell guy.
All of which left me entirely unprepared for the salad we ordered to start our meal.
It took about half an hour to arrive at our table.
"The salad station is really backed up," the waitress explained, unprompted.
No matter. Good food is worth the wait. And it looked promising enough on the plate. A neatly assembled horizontal forest of healthy-looking dandelion greens tied together by a couple wide strips of peeled cucumber, with a creamy raspberry-almond dressing forming a shallow pond alongside it. A couple plump raspberries completed the dish.
I took a leaf and chomped on it. It was bitter. Impossibly, nonsensically bitter. In mild shock, I proceeded to follow the waitress's advice, integrating the greens with the adjacent pinkish puddle.
It didn't help. The dressing was a little sweet, more mayoish than anything, and, most important, entirely ineffective in cutting the bitterness from the leaves.
The salad sat between my wife and I nearly untouched. The waitress was back at the table inside five minutes.
"How are the greens?" she asked.
"Um...," I responded, trailing off. "Interesting."
"Are you done with them?"
This was an interesting question. Under most any other circumstance, it would have been outright absurd. We'd just gotten the salad and had barely put a dent in it. Are we done?
We were done with greens, of course, but I didn't have the heart to tell the waitress so just then. I think she understood. She removed the dish from our table a few minutes later.
After the salad, the rest of the meal was merely mediocre, with (at least) one ingredient too many stuffed into each dish. Like the tuna, which was served on baguette slices piled high with heavily-dressed greens and mushed avocado. Or the duck confit flatbread, flooded with a bleu cheese dressing that tasted fresh out of the Hidden Valley squeeze bottle.
Only the lamb skewers were anything approaching above average. They were tender and tasty, and served with a light, tangy yogurt sauce and an inoffensive cup of (slightly watery) couscous.
Our meal ended unceremoniously. Despite having extra money left on the gift certificate, we decided not to brave dessert. The bill came to $66 and change, and the gift certificate was worth $75. The waitress explained that the remainder couldn't be applied to the tip, which was not news to me. I told her I didn't need the balance back in any case.
What is one to take away from this experience? The sample size, of course, is too small to really say anything for sure. Perhaps we'd managed to order the worst items on the menu. Or maybe it was a terribly off day. Still, it's hard to avoid asking The Big Question: What the hell are all those people doing there?
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