Joey Gibson’s Blog

… but it does.

Last night I dined at my absolute favorite restaurant, Lavender Asian Bistro, where I had my usual meal of Thai spring rolls and unbelievably good Szechuan beef. After the meal, I cracked open my fortune cookie to find this

which made me chuckle.

Fred Thompson is going on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno tonight to officially announce his candidacy for President. Tomorrow he will have some sort of 15 minute webcast about it, too. This editorial points out a few things. First, apparently Fred’s supporters are being dubbed “Fredheads.” OK, I guess I can live with that. But what’s really exciting is this

Thompson is absolutely pro-life, period, no waffling about it. He is solidly pro-Second Amendment, period, no dithering. He’s a gung-ho war on terror man, a no-nonsense border security man.

Those are four amazingly important issues facing the country, and Fred is solid on all four.

As an aside, I have to say that I don’t like the name “war on terror” since terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. Our enemy is clearly defined: radical Islam. But, since the Bush administration has gone out of their way not to “offend” the ever-touchy Muslims in our midst, everyone is familiar with the term. Regardless, Fred is committed to prosecuting it, so that’s a good thing.

We’ve been to two restaurants since Thursday night: the Big Joy Chinese place in Stone Mountain, GA and the local Red Robin and both served up crappy meals.

The first was the Big Joy. No joy there for us. While the restaurant itself was lovely on the inside and the staff was friendly and courteous, the food was awful. The egg rolls came out wallowing around in brown grease, and each contained enough grease to fill a fryer. The allegedly spicy beef dish that I got was bland and uninspired. The Mongolian beef my wife got was stringy, horse-like and also singularly uninspired. The steamed rice was OK, I guess.

The second was today at the Red Robin. Now, this place bills itself as “gourmet” hamburgers. I’ve been there a few times, and to be honest, I don’t know why I keep going back. These “gourmet” burgers are nothing more than frozen beef patties like what you could get in the frozen section of any grocery store. In other words, I could go buy some Bubba Burgers, toss them on my grill and have burgers as good as (if not better than) those at Red Robin. What I want in a burger is like what you get at Chili’s or LongHorn Steakhouse; real hamburgers, hand-made by a human. If I wanted frozen burgers, I’d go to Kroger and save myself some money. The only thing “gourmet” about the burgers at Red Robin is the price. The standard “gourmet” burger is $8.50. It isn’t worth $4.

But the real problem at Red Robin today was what my wife ordered. Based on the description, the “Gourmet Mac & Cheese with Chicken” sounded great. Here’s what the menu says about it

A tasty new take on macaroni and cheese. Made with a masterful culinary combination of Cheddar, American and Goat cheeses, topped with juicy chicken breast, diced hickory-smoked bacon, crushed croutons and parsley. It’s good to be a kid again.

It’s $11.50. Let me say that again. It was $11.50. For Mac & Cheese. She didn’t want the chicken, so that brought it down to $9.50. When it came out, it was a pitifully small bowl of spiral noodles with what looked like melted Velveeta on them. We both looked at it and said, “That’s $10 worth of Mac & Cheese?” We were not happy. We got a manager over who looked at it and said, “I don’t think I’d eat it, either,” which was a good sign, but then she said, “What do you want me to do about it?” Wrong thing to say. As a manager, you should already have a plan for what to do about it. My wife tried to eat some of it, but it was crap. We ended up paying part of the price, but not the whole thing. Regardless, what we paid was still far more than what it was worth.

I can say with 100% certainty that I won’t be going back to the Big Joy again. We might end up at the Red Robin again because my boy likes the “endless” fries, but it won’t be for a while.