I always find it interesting to see how restaurants deal with unhappy customers. I think it really shows the kind of establishment they are. To that end, Jack and I found out how BRU deals with hiccups during service yesterday night. We headed out to dinner just before seven and were seated within a few minutes. We checked out the menu and ordered an appetizer and drinks to start off. We order the tomato and goat cheese strudel and when it came, Jack and I tasted something we didn’t expect.
Olives! Neither of us are olive fans at all and not only are they not even mentioned on the menu, but they are a predominant flavor. Even so much that I couldn’t taste the goat cheese. In the midst of everything, our drinks had been delivered to the table. A pear cosmo for me and a Guinness for him.
Once we tasted the olive fiasco I flagged our waiter and gestured (apparently nonspecifically) to the things on our table and asked “it” was supposed to taste like olives. The server got a really puzzled look on his face and said no and that he would go and check. Not a minute later the bartender showed up and poured me another pear cosmo. I was really surprised and as it turned out the waiter thought I was referring to the drink when I was talking about olives. Obviously the bartender left the drink and got our waiter to come back so in the end I was double fisting drinks…haha…on total accident. It was fine with me because I really loved the flavors!
When we finally settled the whole miscommunication about what actually tasted like olives, the manager came over and said they have had problems with that particular appetizer lately and were actually getting ready to reprint the menus and olives would now be featured as an ingredient so that everyone knew before ordering the strudel what to expect. To replace our first round appetizer, we ended up getting the mac and cheese appetizer instead and because it came after our burgers arrived, we ended up getting it for free! It wasn’t half bad but it wasn’t my favorite appetizer at BRU.
For our burger choices, I picked the house made veggie burger and, on Mary’s high recommendation, I added wonderful buttery Taleggio cheese. Onion rings on the side.
Jack picked the ahi tuna burger with a generous side of fries. He ordered it medium-rare.
Both of these babies were absolutely delicious. I loved the veggie burger because the mushrooms gave it such a meaty flavor and texture and it was large and in charge. I think there could have been some more cheese on top but you know, that might just be me. The onion rings were delightful as always. The tuna burger was soft, supple, and flavorful. The fries, as always, were super crispy and perfectly yummy.
For dessert we ordered, again following Mary’s tastebuds’ recommendation, the peach cobbler white chocolate bread pudding. Oh man, let me just tell you all, this thing was incredible. I wanted the whole thing to myself, the whole thing. I really liked it.
The perfect end to a perfect meal, no matter how messed up it started out. I was really impressed with the way the staff handled all the miscommunications and such. I’m pretty sure BRU has two customers for life. We are seriously enjoying working our way through the menu between this time and the last two. Nomnom!
Today’s eats were also delicious but in a more old school way. Jack and I met up with our friend David for lunch at a Jewish deli in town. This was a new place for us so it was cool to add another restaurant to our Taste of the Big City list. The deli serves things in a cafeteria style line and the whole place is one big open room, so much so it reminded us of eating lunch at school in the gymnasium. We took forever to figure out what we wanted to eat but I finally ordered a half smoked turkey on rye with spicy mustard and I grabbed a cup of Matzo ball soup and a small bowl of broccoli salad.
Jack got a half peppered beef sandwich, a cup of garden vegetable soup and some German potato salad.
All the stuff we had was really good and certainly generous in portion size. The three of us ended up talking a whole bunch and about an hour and a half after we had finished lunch I was craving some dessert and believe me, this deli was well stocked.
Jack and I settled on Devil’s Food Cheesecake Cake and geeze was it delish! The frosting was perfect, the cheesecake creamy, and the cake moist and chocolaty. I was in heaven. My sugar high fueled our subsequent errands to Walmart and Trader Joe’s and when we got back home we set about making a half-batch of cold sesame noodles so they would have time to marinate before dinner.
The rest of the afternoon was sadly full of homework. I spent the whole time doing presentation work for my Cancer Genetics class and around 7p I was starting to get hungry. [Yes, lunch kept me delightfully full for 6.5 hours!] Jack had made us salads and we dished up some noodles for a great dinner.
Post dinner plans comprised of gaming together on the couch. We hooked up our Wii this weekend and while we were out today, we bought a new game –> Zelda: Skyward Sword. We’re dorks so we actually played it in French for a while to work on our French in an interactive way. Let’s just say we needed a lot of Google Translate help, me more so than Jack because his vocabulary is way bigger than mine, and eventually it became a bit too much work to translate everything. I started getting annoyed that I didn’t know what was going on or what I was supposed to be doing so we switched the English and I learned how to fight. I think I enjoy playing attack games on the Wii better than the Xbox because in order to slice someone with my sword I just have to swing the controller around instead of press the right combination of buttons. So much more practical, let’s be honest. When I called it a night from playing I was a bit hungry so I snacked on some berries while we watched an episode of Stargate SG-1.
Now we’re finishing up the second episode and we’ll head to bed because we have parish breakfast to work and church mass to attend tomorrow. Catechumens are being recognized tomorrow in the Rite of Enrollment so it should be a nice service. See you then!
Questions: What’s your favorite deli sandwich?
What is your best/worst restaurant mess up experience?
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