Walkin' Around Checkin' Stuff Out. #76
Whoa!...75. That's a milestone of sorts. Time to start planning the 100th post party.
Note: These are just the drawings from our upcoming Greenline Checklist Update. Subscribe to the Heavy Table to see the full update when it comes out…it includes the full food reviews, photos of what we ate and great atmospheric write-ups of the night. Good stuff and worth the price of admission. Let’s eat!
Greenline Checklist Update!
It can be a bleak street, that’s for sure. They’ve tried to update buildings and stuff over the years, but I wish they would have just left it. It should be seedy and have a little edge. Now it feels like it’s stuck between seedy and wanting to be a suburban mall, and it doesn’t do either of them well. But the food on the other hand...
King Cajun.
Based on our last experience at a seafood boil place (and others we’ve been to in town), none of us had any hope for this place. In fact, we were sort of dreading it. But this place has a sink to was your hands right in the middle of the dining area. That certainly says you’re going to make a mess, but will the food be any good?
The food was...good! Not great, but pretty damn good especially considering what we thought it was going to be like. James was pleasantly surprised by the presentaion...or maybe relieved.
Who takes kids to a seafood place? Isn’t that kind of spendy, especially since they’d probably rather have mac & cheese or a hot dog. Maybe kids palete’s have evolved since I was a kid.
The first thing we noticed when we walked in was the place was buzzin’ bigtime. Families were crammed at tables wearing the plastic gloves and bibs stuffing their faces with shrimp and crawdads...it was serious business and eating that kind of food requires serious work.
Plastic toys of the things you eat seem like essential decor at these places...and sriracha sauce...lots of sriracha sauce.
Ishita Ramen.
The lightrail has transformed University Avenue considerably. I’m all for lightrail...I wish we had more of it. But when they put it in they gave zero thought to University as a walking street. It’s brutal. Not a good street to walk at all. Even the sex workers and drug dealers think it sucks.
Not a bad little joint. Not the best ramen in the world, but it’s light, not too rich, cheap and gets the job done. The server was very speedy and always had a smile.
Some people look like their dogs...this dude looked like his food with his noodle-like hair. (Hey, these outings get long and sometimes dull...I gotta find something interesting about the place.)
Standard-issue restaurant table set-up. I bet I’ve drawn a couple hundred of them on these checklist outings.
Kitchen cook takes a break between orders. They ran a tight ship at this place...one cook and one server. I guess they didn’t expect to get too busy.
Peking Garden.
Last time we were here it was the same place, different name. Sadly the food isn’t the same and the place was a letdown.
They still had the fish pond and all the decor was the same, but the food didn’t hold up. Bummer.
I bet they could seat 500 people in this place...it’s huge. It felt empty when we were there, but there could have been 50 people eating...a lot of people by any other restaurant standard, it just felt empty in that huge space. But it’s a production, they know how to roll out a lot of food, fast.
The one good thing I can say about the place is they have the worlds heaviest menus. That’s gotta be worth something, right?
Master Noodle.
I absolutely love all the home made noodle shops we have in town. I think this was one of the first. I was here a few years ago and thought it was pretty good, but will it hold up with all the new spots popping up...?
Master Noodle has all the others beat in the performance department. They put the noodle making front and center and it’s fun to watch.
What starts out as a lump of dough turns into one long thin noodle right before your eyes through a series of spins and flips done by a dude who clearly has a lot of skill, flipping and turning the dough in his hands until that big lump of dough becomes a perfect noodle, no pasta making machine required. Pretty amazing.
Dude takes a break between noodle batches. He knows he’s the star of the show...but all the show is nothing if the food’s not good. Glad to report the food was fantastic and I’ll be going back soon.
I hope he has a title like Master Noodle Maker, or maybe Noodle-Magician. You have to go just to see how he forms the noodles. I’m still amazed.
The Black Hart Of St. Paul.
Our last trip down the Greenline this place had a different name and we walked into a drag show which was pretty awesome and fun. Seems like the same place, just a different name...and sadly, no drag show on the night we visited.
No drag show, but pool was the thing the night we stopped in. Drag pool would be a cool thiung to watch...they should consider that.
I love a good seedy bar scene. This woman seemed to out for action and working this guy over pretty good. I wonder if she knows this is a gay bar, because he wasn’t interested...so she moved on to another guy at the bar after a shot of a pink drink that tasted like cough syrup (it looked like the drink we ordered and it gave off bigtime cough syrup vibes.) We didn’t hang around long enough to see if her luck changed.
Her luck may not have changed, but ours did the minute a woman walked in off the street selling homemade tamales, saving us from the food service bar food this place was selling. Damn, those tamales were really good...they seemd to have fennel in them, which seems odd to me, but made them taste amazing. You never know what the night will give you on these Checklists.
Good one!