At the Roadhouse
Another desultory day at the bridge table.
We played the morning compact KO, and lost both halves.
We played the first round of yet another prime time KO, and lost some more.
So once again we ‘qualified’ for the evening loser BAM teams. This time Mike and I played with Danny and Bob–Jack and Bill drove the 8 miles to Pigeon Forge (home of Dollywood, which I hope to see one day) and saw the movie 42. Since they were asleep by the time we got home I won’t have a report until morning.
Here’s the good news: we tied for first.
They are trying out a new system whereby you get your scores by email or text message “right after the game”. The idea is brilliant, the execution needs some work. Last night “right after the game” turned out to be an email timestamped 5:14 am. All new technology needs some time to work out the kinks, and I’m sure that they will get this working in due course.
Dinner isn’t very exciting here, as you must have noticed. Tonight we went to the Texas Roadhouse, which is pretty much like every other place in town. They don’t take reservations, but you can call in ahead. It’s sort of like a reservation, except they don’t call it that. I don’t understand, but there’s a lot here I don’t understand.
I had the ribs.
Half a rack of ribs
Nothing fancy, but the ribs were very good. I chose the sweet potato with brown sugar and cinnamon. Never tasted the cinnamon or the sugar, but there was enough butter (or butter-like substance) to float a battleship.
Bill had the pulled pork:
Pulled pork, steak fries and biscuits
About the “butter like substance”. They put rolls on the table. Soft, doughy, warm, sweet, rolls. And then serve them with honey butter. We asked for butter and got a dish of the butter-like substance. Everything in this town is cheap, and they have to fight costs in every single item to make a living. No real butter.
The service is fantastic. A young woman, full of vigor and good will, calls all of us old guys “sweetie”, ‘sweetheart”, ‘honey” or ‘dearie’. Orders are taken and filled at the speed of light. I was still eating my dinner when the check appeared–they didn’t even try to sell us dessert. We were in and out of there in under 45 minutes, the better to turn the table, get another group in and make another couple of dollars–it can’t be much, dinner for all 6 of us was about $100.
Since we lost this morning, Mike and I have tomorrow morning off. I have a special event planned, be sure to check in.
To Tennessee for good Mexican
As far as I’m concerned, the best restaurant in Gatlinburg is No Way Jose’s. It’s also the closest one to our house, which makes it a double winner. Tonight was our night to go there.
That’s after a busy day, of course The first thing that happened is I got ready to go play cards this morning and found that I had no car keys. The other guys leave for the 9 am start, and I come in after the first 12 boards. But they had managed to take one of the cars and all of the car keys. Several phone calls later I managed to get Mike on the phone. He told Jack who told Bob who jumped in the car they had and delivered the keys–fortunately we are only about 4 or 5 minutes from the playing site.
All of which was to no avail since we lost the match.
Then I walked out and down the street and had lunch at Johnny Rockets, which had no customers and about 7 employees. I got the best service in history, and a pretty good Philly cheese steak. G’burg in general doesn’t seem very busy to me this year, and there certainly wasn’t any business at Johnny Rocket’s.
Back for the afternoon session, and Mike and I started out. The match was fairly swingy, and we were tied with one board left to score–but sadly the opponents made a game against us at our table, and made a game our way at the other table, so we had a huge loss and ended up down 16 for the first half.
I was out the second half. Went to the grocery to restock the house and then back to relax. Mike called and said they lost 11 to 56 in the second half. He was wrong–it was 11 to 61. That meant we qualified for the loser swiss tonight.
So out to dinner. I always read the whole menu at a Mexican place, then order the fajitas. Same thing here.
I tried to show the steam rising from the sizzling platter.
There is nothing really special about this plate, it’s just a good plate of chicken fajitas. It came with two more plates, of rice, beans, guacamole, sour cream, salsa, cheese and lettuce. Nobody goes hungry in G’burg.
Micky had the enchilada plate:
Three enchiladas. On a plate the size of a manhole cover.
We are six large men, and there was more than enough food for all of us.
My bill for dinner came to $20, but that includes the tip. This place is cheap.
Leaving No Way Jose’s, I saw some of the local wildlife, so tame that they just ignore the traffic. That’s Mike walking on the left hand side:
Cousins to Frank and Elizabeth back at home.
Since we lost this morning we will start another compact KO tomorrow at 9. Mike and I will be playing with friends from home, Gary McGregor and his partner, and the other 4 guys will make one team.
In other home town news, I saw that Mike Rippey and his partner, George, picked up two other guys also named George and Mike and played in the KO’s, coming in 2nd in their bracket. And Jack Meng and Judy Keilin found partners here and placed in their bracket. So our unit is doing well here in the hinterlands.
Time to hit the sack–9 am gets here way too soon for my taste.
The best thing about Gatlinburg
I’m not one for eating dinner early. It is my solid opinion that 5 pm is when the nanny eats dinner with the children; the adults eat at 6:30 or 7 or 8. Bridge tournaments, with their continuing emphasis on starting the second session earlier and earlier, are bad enough. Here, I am saddled with teammates who like to eat really early. They have been known to go out to dinner at 4:30 in the afternoon. That’s siesta time, not dinner time.
It turns out that there is another group that likes to eat early–rednecks. My early eating teammates made a 5:00 pm reservation at Peddlers tonight, which is when they open. There was a huge crowd waiting for the doors to be unlocked, and it took almost 15 minutes before they could get us to a table, not that I was in any hurry.
We are 6 big men, and the table we got wasn’t really big enough, but that’s life in the big city. They took our drink orders and shooed us off to the salad bar–every meal comes with it.
Feeding frenzy at the salad bar.
Salad bars have largely gone out of style in California, except for the Crows Nest in Santa Cruz, but they are big here. Something about all you can eat really motivates people. Since everyone came in at once, everyone went to fill their plate at once and there was quite a line, but it moved fast and we got back to our seat.
Then the meat man comes around to take your order:
Pick your own cut
This handsome fellow, fortunately named Chris, show up rolling a cart with a full strip of New Yorks and a full strip of rib eye steaks. You can order standard cuts off the menu, or show him how much you want him to cut off for your personal choice. There’s something very elemental about seeing the huge slabs of raw meat, and it’s a powerful presentation.
I tried to be a good boy and ordered the grilled trout. Then I ruined the healthiness of it by ordering the sweet potato casserole. The single best thing about eating here in the Smokies is sweet potato casserole–sweet potatoes, brown sugar, coconut and maple syrup. And butter. Lots of butter. Every little boy in America would eat his vegetables if they all tasted like this, but it’s really more like dessert than dinner.
Not much trout here
This is the only dish I’ve had here with what you would call a small portion–two trout fillets are about 5 ounces or less of fish, and not very good fish, either. I guess I should know better than to order anything other than MEAT around here.
Jack had the steak/shrimp combo, and it looked quite a bit better:
New York steak, broiled shrimp and steak fries. A meal for a man.
For me, at least, dinner tonight was not very exciting. But then, I came here to play cards, not experience fine dining. And the cards are going well–we are in the finals of the first KO event tonight, having vanquished one very good team and two pretty good teams. There are 25 brackets in this event, we are in bracket 2, where each player has an average of 6200 masterpoints. It’s a pretty tough field.
That’s all for now–time to go play the finals. Wish us luck.
Obesity for sale
People are just plain bigger here in the south. I’m sort of a skinny guy here, and I like that. I take good care of my shape using Rapid Tone supplements. Taking a look at the concessions you can quickly find an explanation for the excess poundage on display in G’burg:
The mind reels. The amount of sugar and fat for sale staggers the imagination. It’s no wonder you see so many 400 pound people.
When we go out to eat, it’s the same thing. The rolls on the table are excessively sweet. The BBQ sauce is sweet. The cole slaw is sweet. If it isn’t deep fried, it full of sugar. Sometimes, it’s full of sugar and deep fried–I had to explain to Mike what a fried pie was yesterday.
Nobody ever accused me of being a health food addict, and this stuff is too much for me. I guess I can survive one week a year of it, but I know I wouldn’t last long if I lived here.
Dangerous Driving
As much as I love travel, there are some risks. Jet lag, legionnaires disease, Montezuma’s revenge can all strike the unwary tourist. Some things, though, just make you nervous right away.
Seeing the New York license plates on our rental car gives me the whim-whams. The idea of southern cops loving to ticket NY drivers may be an old myth, but its one I don’t really want to test.
The car itself in nice enough–I’ve got a Mazda 5 which is a small station wagon. It actually has 6 seats, but I’d hate to try to put grown-ups in the back two.
There is one very strange thing–
What the heck is a “cat folder”?? Where do you insert the cat? What shape does it fold the cat into? Why does anyone want a folded cat in the first place?
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The house is as nice as last year. There are bumblebees outside the size of hummingbirds. The weather is balmy. Life is good here, and yet we are watching the horrid news from Boston.
I guess we’re in a world where you are never entirely safe, yet I fear a panicked overreaction to this latest incursion on our serenity. Politicians will undoubtedly start grandstanding, calling for laws and restrictions of very dubious value. The police will see an opportunity to be more officious. We will do more harm to ourselves than whoever planted those bombs could ever hope for.
I’m all in favor of the British motto–“Keep Calm and Carry On”. The bad guys will be found and punished. The world will go on. Keep calm and carry on.
Dallas, always Dallas
Welcome to the Totally Unauthorized suite at the Days Inn DFW.
This is what you get for $50 on Priceline. They picked me up in a Lincoln Navigator, the room has clean sheets and, one trusts, hot water in the morning. There’s a hot breakfast included and a shuttle ride back to the airport to meet Micky and fly off to Knoxville. I think that’s a pretty good deal.
The flight was uneventful. The good news was that the airplane had Wi-Fi. I was able to play two tournaments with Gail on BridgeBase.
Playing on the iPad is not too different than on my desktop, but I did make one mis-bid when the plane bounced and I passed instead of making the bid I intended. But it was our day, and pass with the right bid. God looks out for fools, I guess.
Life can’t be too bad if you get a section top at 37,000 feet.
Time to hit the sack. More tomorrow.
The glamorous life of the jet setter
Starting out on the annual trip to Gatlinburg. My plane is already two hours late.
Huge winds in the bay area have slowed traffic at the airport. For some reason one of the runways is closed entirely.
Fortunately, American airlines called me this afternoon so I knew the plane would be an hour and a half late. Now that I’m here ihey’re tacking on another half hour to the projected departure time.
The luxury tray of sushi you see above is my deluxe gourmet dinner quickly snatched from one of the restaurants at the airport. It is overpriced, of medium quality, and not the least bit exciting.
I have to fly to Dallas tonight, stay in a cheap hotel, and complete the trip in the morning. With this delay, I won’t be in the hotel until almost 1 AM. I have to be back at the airport by nine to make my flight tomorrow.
Such is the life of the itinerant bridge player. I know I will have a good time in Gatlinburg, but the getting there can be challenging.
Assemble
We liked the Boilerhouse, a restaurant in a former Ford assembly plant in Richmond, but it folded.
Now I can say we like Assemble, the new establishment in the same space. It’s brand new; they just started serving dinner last week. They have a few kinks to work out, but I think that they are well on track to succeed.
Of course, like all new restaurants, they pay tribute to the holy trininty of modern foodie-hood: local, organic and sustainable. I don’t care. The food is good or it isn’t. Most of the food here was good and that’s all that matters to me.
This love fest doesn’t apply to the the appetizer I ordered the second I saw it on the menu: hushpuppies.
Somebody’s idea of hushpuppies. Not mine.
I’m not sure that whoever designed these little pebbles of fried cornmeal has ever even seen a proper hushpuppy, let alone eaten one. These are too small, too perfect, not sweet enough, not soft enough in the center, just all around wrong. Do not order them.
Things picked up rapidly from there, though. First up was the curry squash soup:
Curry Squash Soup
This soup was just right–not too rich, the croutons completely perfect, the seasoning exactly where it should be.
For an entreé, I had the crab/shrimp Louis. Anything with a creamy salad dressing is probably just the illusion of a healthy meal, but I’m will to live with my dreams and false hopes.
Tons of crab and shrimp, hard cooked egg, asparagus, lettuce and Louis dressing. What’s not to love?
Both Gail and Kate had the gumbo, and it, too was a winner:
Chicken, sausage, shrimp, rice and gumbo file, dressed with cornbread sticks. Just like being in New Orleans.
The gumbo was served with ramekins of honey butter for the cornbread. The girls finished their gumbo, I finished the cornbread and honey butter. Life is good.
Brad isn’t imaginative–he went for the old standby:
Cheeseburger. Wedge fries. American comfort food, properly prepared and served.
Service in Assemble is great. Of course, they are brand new and seemed to have more employees than customers. That will change, and soon. The food here is excellent, the location is delightful and prices are reasonable. Give Assemble a try.
Never on a Monday
Go out for a good dinner, that is.
Monday is the traditional night off for the chef. That may not matter if you’re eating at Denny’s, but a real restaurant has a real chef, and when he’s not there the quality has been known to suffer.
We made our mistake at Metro, usually one of our favorite places. They have changed chefs at least twice in the last year, so perhaps the problem is with whoever is wearing the toque these days, but I’m sticking with my Monday theory for now.
We started with the English Pea soup, which was excellent. Not at all like the usual heavy, ham laden soup I expected, this one was much lighter and fresher than you would think when you hear “pea soup”. Metro should keep this one on the menu.
I ordered the asparagus. How hard can that be? Too hard, so it seems. We got a half dozen spears of overcooked asparagii, with a glob of some kind of molten cheese and a strip of prosciutto. The cheese, rapidly congealing around the vegetables, was neither attractive nor appetizing.
The meatballs we ordered were just tasteless. The tomato sauce they were swimming in was decent, but there was really nothing exciting about this dish.
Gail liked the brussels sprouts about as much as Mike would have–remember that Mike won’t eat the little green things. She thought they were seriously overcooked (not unlike the asparagus above).
Lastly, we had the duck spring rolls, which were uninspired at best and not even a little bit up to the standard I’ve come to expect from Metro.
Service was fine, since the chef has nothing to do with it. We were very pleased to get the table right in front of the fireplace (which I had called in advance to reserve) even though the threesome at the adjoining table seemed excessively loud and the acoustics in that facility are dreadful.
I’ll certainly give Metro at least one more try, but it won’t be on a Monday.
Great fast food
Two fish tacos, rice and beans. The perfect fast lunch
Usually I like my Mexican food from a hole in the wall where they don’t speak English. It’s more authentic, tastier, just more real. Professionally run, corporate managed places tend to make bland, predictable, boring Mexican food. You won’t find me at Taco Bell, but this new place Rubio’s Fresh Mexican Grill, is a major exception.
Yesterday, I played in a sectional in Saratoga, and my partner and I had to find a place to eat between sessions. Saratoga is way too upscale for any hole in the wall Mexican, so we drove around a shopping center and ended up at Rubio’s. I recognized the name because they have a store near the Kohl’s in Pleasant Hill, although I had never been there.
Rubio’s serves fish tacos. A few other things, but mostly fish tacos. You can have battered haddock or grilled salmon, tilapia, mahi mahi or shrimp. There’s some chicken and beef on the premises, but they don’t make a big deal of it. Order a plate and get two sides–pintobeans, red beand, chips or rice. They have salads and burritos, but what they do best, and they do it very well indeed, is fish tacos.
I had the battered pollock, Jerry had the grilled salmon. They were both excellent. There is a table with 4 different salsas available so you can spice it up to your hearts content. The usual soft drinks. Corn tortillas, the flour cost 30¢ more.
The price is fast food reasonable–my two taco plate and a drink was about $8.50. Service was fast, and the manager is walking around to make sure everything is to your liking. The restaurant is clean and well designed and doesn’t blow your ears out with loud music–a frequent failure of the hole in the wall.
I love this place. If they put in wi-fi I’d sit there and blog all day.
Totally Unauthorized 