2/13/2015 Crabtown in Bricktown, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Crabtown

After the Ranch Steakhouse, we needed a "rebound place", so we wandered into Crabtown.

On the left is the Manager, Dan. His energy level is through the roof. This isnt a "sit in my office and yell at people" Manager. Dan leads from the front, and by example. As you can see, he is really hard to miss in that shirt. This also serves as a warning to the servers that Dan is on the prowl, since he is probably visible from space. To prove this, on the right is our sever, Kara. She was not asked to pose, although to be polite, we did ask if we could take her picture. Everything else is spontaneous. It should come as no surprise, after all the atmosphere in there is reflected in the faces of these two. Everyone seemed happier than normal. Of course, they might have been taking turns hitting the bong in the break room too, but I doubt it.

There is a Mardi Gras thing going on here on the 17th, so we might have to come back.

So Danny got a combination bucket with crab and shrimp, I got the shrimp bucket, and Alex got the fried clams. The buckets were awesome. Big shrimp, potatoes, corn and andouille sausage. The sausage was even more awesome than the rest of the bucket, and I ordered an extra. Danny tried to give half his food to Alex, because it was obvious that Alex chose the wrong thing. Either we were unclear, or just missed the fact that the whole thing was fried. It was a mess of fried clams on top of french fries. Even though the clams were pretty good, it wasn't what he was looking for that night. Yes, Alligator was on the menu (below) and it was ordered and consumed. Pretty good stuff. A pic of the actual alligator is below the menu, and below that is another appetizer called Krabby Balls. They were great, but I wanted to save room for the REALLY good stuff. Which, apparently was too good to take pictures of, because we sort of forgot. Give us a break, we were STARVING!! OK, maybe not starving, but we were REALLY HUNGRY. That counts for something, right?

Perfect comeback place after the near disaster at Ranch.

Service: 5 out of 5 easy. <<< First one ever for this blog!

Food: 4 out of 5 (Alex's clams dropped a point)

2/12/2015 Ranch Steakhouse, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

In retrospect, I suppose we should have known when we pulled up that any place with a valet is probably going to be above the per diem limit. You see, we are restricted to a certain amount each day. We went in anyway, and quickly found out that while there were things on the menu that we would be able to get and still be within limits, but an actual steak would be out of reach.

Even before that, we had another chance to punch out, and that was when the hostess looked us up and down, made a face (slightly, but it was there), and told us that she "could not seat us anywhere except the bar area". Then we were shuttled off into the furthest corner of the bar. The servers were polite, but in the sort of way that said "pleas hurry and order, eat and GTFO".

In any case, we ignored all these warning signs and pressed on. Revealed on the menu was a 10oz Sirloin for $59. Wow. OK well I am a firm believer in "You get what you pay for", so we continued, even though the price of the steak was nearly over our allowable limit. That's when the server dropped the bomb. The sirloin was a normal everyday sirloin. Available, however was Kobe and Wagyu beef for only $10 per ounce.

Oh sure. Because I want to spend 100 bucks tonight on the appetizer sized steak. Now don't get me wrong. I am not opposed to spending 100 or more on a good dinner. We all know its less about the food and more about the fine dining experience, right? Right? Well if "Fine Dining" includes having two servers that we hardly ever saw, and a trainee that came around to refill drinks (apparently they weren't allowed to talk to customers), then that's where we were.

Obviously nobody ordered steak. Danny and Alex got a lobster pasta dish, and I opted for grilled salmon. Alex asked the server how much actual lobster was in the dish, and she said 7-8 ounces. She must have meant 7-8 ounces split between Danny and Alex, because that's pretty much what it was. So basically they got a bowl of noodles that might have had a few ounces of lobster in it for $35. For my part, I spent $32 on 6 ounces of farm raised salmon. Seriously. I'm live in the Pacific Northwest. I catch wild salmon from the beach near my house. Even if I didn't want to do that, I could have gotten about 6 POUNDS of fresh (not farm raised) salmon for $32. And yes, I can tell the difference by the taste. In the NW, farm raised applies to cows and pigs, not fish.

Heres a hint, Ranch Steakhouse: If you're going to charge top dollar, what you put on the plate had better not be substandard in any way. That did not happen here. Save your money.

Service: 2 out of 5
Food: 2 out of 5

2/10/2015 Volcano Sushi, Del City, Oklahoma

Alex got this thing

 I dont know why Alex always gets a pic of me taking pics, but thats seems to be the way it is.Which is OK, because at the end of this, I get my revenge. DO try to resist the urge to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page prior to reading. This will lead to carpal tunnel syndrome, and we all know that ain't nobody got time for that.

I won't go through what we got, because we ordered seemingly half of the menu. And, for a sushi bar in the middle of Oklahoma, where the nearest live tuna is somewhere around 1000 miles away, this place is great. I mean, its no Mr. Kevins (if you know, you know), but then again Mr Kevin trained to be a sushi chef since the doctor spanked him on the butt in the delivery room. So, with that visual, enjoy the...er....visuals.

Wasabi Tuna Ball

White Tuna (we think)

ME

There is a picture here somewhere of the White Tuna, and I recommend eating this with no Wasabi and just a light dip through the soy sauce. This is the best part of the tuna, and if you care about Omega-3 acids and stuff like that, this dish is off the chart as far as that goes. However, White Tuna is sometimes not actually Tuna at all, but Escolar. According to my research, if it is white with a pink hue, its Albacore tuna. If it is all white and tastes buttery and fantastic, its Escolar. Part of my research was conducted HERE. If you follow links from there, you will also find out how to keep from shitting your pants after too much White Tuna. Or Escolar. or whatever it is that you just ate that you thought was tuna. Oddly, I ate a LOT of it, and didn't have an issue, but that is probably because the "powers that be" take pity on the ignorant, and don't allow you to have a case of explosive oily diarrhea, when you don't know why its happening. This is the same reason you don't chow down on three cans of those low fat Pringles, which will almost certainly result in a case of The Great and Terrible Unwashable Ass Grease. Consider yourself warned.

All in all, you cant go wrong here. Well, maybe you can but we didn't. This is clearly the best inland sushi place I have been too, and Danny and Alex agree. We have all had the real deal in Japan, so we know what the hell we are talking about.

Food: 4 out of 5
Service: 4 out of 5

Alex eats the longest turnip string in history

2/9/2015 - Zios, Bricktown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

To get to this place, you have to go down Flaming Lips alley. This conjures up images that are not fit to print in an environment such as this, but suffice it to say that none of what you are thinking is true. Its just an alleyway with a pay to park lot at the end of it. And its pay to park your CAR. In a lot. Not anything else.

Danny got: Seafood Fettuccine
Alex got: Grilled Salmon
I got: Ribeye Tuscano

Now this place...this place is somewhere you can go more than once a week. There are almost too many things on the menu, and they all look awesome. Now, other than Alex's salmon being a bit on the dry side, everything else was pretty damn good. Danny had enough seafood fettuccine to feed an army (or one normal Italian person), and my steak was better than the one I had at Cattlemen's, which is supposed to be THE steak place.

The service was good, the diet coke was not flat, and the place had a roomy feel to it that you don't really get in a lot of places anymore. By that I mean that the tables weren't crammed in there, and the servers had room to walk around without rubbing their ass on your shoulder. Even the appetizers were really, really good. I could have eaten at least 20 more of the stuffed mushrooms, and the calamari was cooked just right. That means it wasn't like chewing on a car tire, nor was it a gooey mess on the plate.

Even the mini loaves of bread were good. I could talk about this place the entire night if I wanted too, but we have other places to go. Food to eat. We have about two weeks left here in OKC, so we are looking for other places to go and see.

Food: 4 out of 5 (Alex's salmon prevents a 4.5)
Service: 4 out of  5

2/8/2015 Buffalo Wild WIngs, Del City, Oklahoma

Do you really expect me to write a review on BWW?? Well I'm not. OK? Not going to do it.

I will say this. Our server, Cierra, was pretty good in the face of a lot of screw ups from the kitchen. First she brought us the completely wrong order after about 40 min of waiting. For wings. This however, is not her fault. We saw her going to the kitchen several times to ask (probably), what the hell was taking so long.

So we waited another 20 for the right stuff, and we could tell that she was about three seconds from a total catastrophic meltdown, so we stopped her for a sec, and got her to calm down by letting her know that we knew it wasn't her fault, and not to split her tips with the kitchen staff.

Then we proceeded to burn our faces completely off with hot wings.

Food: Seriously, it was a BWW
Service: Cierra 4.5 out of 5 stars, kitchen 1

Danny's order was so long that Cierra had to sit down to take it.

2/7/2015 George's, Waco, Texas

Soooo, we got the opportunity to drive 4.5 hours south to Waco the meet the boss, Randy. NO we did not let Alex drive. I drove, so we got there safely, and Danny drove back. I will freely admit that I had too much tea and couldn't hold it all the way back, and we had to stop with 40 min to go in the trip. In my defense, I did wait until every bump in the road felt like Chuck Norris punching me in the kidneys before I gave in.

We went to Georges, a very popular place right off the Baylor campus, and we had to wait 25 min just to get a table. I remember thinking that it had better be worth the wait....

Danny had: seafood feast
Alex had: fried pickles, chicken fried steak
Randy had: Combo Fajitas
I had: fried jalapeño, black and bleu burger

Chicken Fried steak

Fajitas

The service was college girls, the food was cooked probably by college kids, but it was actually pretty good. It wasn't anything special, but this really isn't the place to go for special. This is the place you go for food that wont kill you (right away) and lots of it. The appetizer baskets were HUGE. I had the fried jalapeno. That's what it said on the menu, so I pictured in my head a couple of whole or halved jalapenos, fried. What I got was approximately 15 jalapenos, sliced, then fried. Holy crap.And they weren't wuss jalapenos either. Randy had one, said "Oh my God" and turned back to his fajitas. However Randy, like me, likes the hot stuff, and it wasn't long before he was snacking on them again.

Everything we got except Randy's fajitas, had something fried on it, if not the entire plate. If I still had a gall bladder, I could have killed it at Georges. This is not recommended, because when I actually DID kill my gall bladder, it took a large amount of morphine to bring the pain around to something that didn't feel like I was being stabbed repeatedly in the gall bladder with a rusty piece of sharpened rebar.

Did I mention HUGE? The pic of the Chicken Fried steak does it no justice...there was about 40 ounces of breaded meat on Alex's plate and he didn't even put a dent in it, and he was stuffed. We took a LOT of food back to Oklahoma.

Food: 3 out of 5 stars
Service: 3.5 out of 5 stars

Black and Bleu burger

2/6/2015 Guernseys, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Well today we just HAD to go do some uppity "fine dining". We found out two things: First, the term "fine dining" can be interchanged freely with "you're not going to get enough to eat, and you're going to spend more money than you think". Luckily, only the first part of that applied here.

Crab Dip

Danny had: scallops, nem noung, ginger chicken
Alex had: crab dip, seafood combination
I had: oxtail ravioli, seafood combination

I know a lot of people that are put off with food that comes from the tail area, including oxtail, rocky mountain oysters, lamb fries, and straight up chicken fried bull foreskin. These same people will tell you how disgusting these things are while chowing down a quarter pound Wal Mart hot dog from China. HOT DOGS ARE LIPS AND ASSHOLES, PEOPLE!

Hypocrites.

Alex

Anyway, everything we had was absolutely fantastic. Wait, I take that back. This place had the flattest diet Coke ever. I was like drinking diet coke that had been left out for 5 days under a grease trap, then chilled and served. Apparently the "Carlo Rossi Treatment" doesn't work on diet coke. If you know what that is, then you know what I'm talking about. If you look at the Seafood Combo below, you will see a couple huge shrimp, some sashimi (tuna and yellowfin), and that huge mushroom looking thing is a giant scallop. The rest is arugula and wild rice.

Danny (who is Vietnamese), declared the Nem Nuong (a Vietnamese dish) "very good". His comment about the Ginger Chicken? "I think they forgot the ginger". Whoops...gig. And before the three of you point out that Alex and I ordered the same thing, I would point out that I got the "carb free" version of the plate. So there.

Speaking of Danny, we also found out that Danny is our "High Maintenance" diner, asking for lemonade, which wasn't on the menu. Our server offered to have the bartender make him some, and he got his lemonade. One can only wonder if he also received extra spit in that, or just the normal amount of spit expected at uppity fine dining spots.

Food: 4.5 out of 5
Service: 4 out of 5

Seafood Combination

Joe, caught by Alex in a modified picture while I modified a picture on my phone. Irony...

2/5/2015 Cimmaron Steakhouse, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Well today was the day we decided that it would be a fantastic idea to start taking pictures of the places we go. See? We are growing smarter!! Sort of. At least George isn't here to drag down the average IQ.

Danny (left) and Alex

Anyways...

Danny got: 12 oz Sirloin
Alex got: Ribs (Full Rack)
I got: Ribs (Full Rack)
Our Server: No Idea

Apparently we STILL have not learned to order different stuff. Whatever. The pork spareribs were awesome. I mean really awesome tasting, although I didn't really like the way they fell apart. That, however didn't stop me from scarfing almost an entire rack of them like a fat kid at a freecotton candy buffet. Danny consumed his sirloin in about 14 minutes. We had a lot of time to talk about the food because our server was rarely anywhere to be found. When she did come around, however, she was nice as can be, throwing in all of those southern terms of endearment, calling everyone "Sugar" and "Darlin" and "Honey".

If we had known nothing about the place, we still would have gone because the parking lot was full. That is considered to be a good sign. That, or there is a strip club next door (we didn't check). While the serving size on the main courses and sides we very generous, the appetizers were tiny. I ordered fried mushrooms, and when the showed up, there were about 9 shrooms in there. Seriously. NINE.

Food: 3.5 out of 5
Service: 3 out of 5

The outside

2/4/2015 Ted's Cafe, Del City Oklahoma

So again with the same orders...

Danny got: Shrimp Fajitas
Alex got: Shrimp Fajitas
I got: Pork Chile Verde
Our Server: Serenity

As you can see, we have now added the servers name to the list, just in case she (or he) deserves props or a good talking to. In most cases, you really wont run into a super rude server, because, lets face it, they live on tips. The better they are, the bigger the tip. Usually. Of course there are those people out there that just cant spare the extra 10-20% out of their pocket. If you cant afford to tip good service, stay home. Its part of the package.

Anyway, Serenity was right at the table as soon as we were seated with the requisite chips and salsa, after all, it IS a Mexican place. Also right away we asked to try the Atomic Salsa. Turns out that the Atomic Salsa was actually sub atomic, and we let Serenity know. She immediately said: "Oh we have hotter, we just don't offer it up front. I'll get you some".

So we got some. When it arrived, it looked much more evil than the Atomic Salsa, and Alex flat out refused to try it. Of course I tucked in, and ate several habanero flavored bites before I realized that the heat was creeping up on me. Danny took a few bites and declared it "hot enough".

Then Serenity decided to leave us alone. with no iced tea, and I was running out of water, which, as everyone knows, doesn't help one bit. Luckily, it leveled out, and I realized that it was only a habanero/jalapeno blend, and I wasn't going to die.

The rest of the meal was pretty good, a little above average compared to other Mexican places.


So heres where we change it a little, rating the food separate from the service:

Food - 3 stars
Service - 4.5 stars

2/3/2015 Cattlemen's Steakhouse in Historic Stockyard City, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

This is the place everyone said we had to go. Literally. Everyone in the office we work at here at Tinker AFB, Oklahoma said we just HAD to eat a steak at Cattlemen's. So, we took their advice and went. Danny drove this time, so we didn't have to see our lives flash before our eyes every 10 seconds.

We arrived early and there was no wait, and we were treated to old school decor and feel. We were also the youngest ones in the joint. By a LOT.

We ordered, and...

Danny got: 24 oz Presidential T-Bone
Alex got: 11 oz Sirloin
I got: 11 oz Sirloin

Yeah I know its hard to get a feel for a place when two people order the same thing, but I wanted sirloin. It was Hereford beef, by the way. I asked, and the guy was a little smarter than the average waiter (bonus). Also revisited the okra, which we also had at Vans, and we have come to the conclusion that people who think okra is slimy and gross have never had it cooked right. So shut up about the okra already and come to Oklahoma, where they obviously know how to make it.

Danny and Alex inexplicably wanted their steak medium well, and unfortunately that's the way i got mine too, even though I asked for medium RARE (gig). It was, luckily, still not cooked to shoe leather consistency, so I didn't gripe about it. The taste was still good and the rest of the meal was just enough.

Down here in the south, they really don't understand "no carb" so you have to be specific about no potato, fries, rice, etc etc...or else you're going to get a giant potato with everything.

4 stars out of 5 (the smart waiter gains half a star)

2/2/2015 Van's Pig Stand, Moore, Oklahoma

I'm Joe, and I am not a professional critic, but I do have no problem telling you what I think right up front. If you cant handle that, you probably wont like me too much, and i really don't give a shit if you do or not. Anyway, I travel, and I work for the government (indirectly) so when I travel I get Per Diem.If you were a VP squadron member, you know ALLLL about per diem. If you dont know what per diem is, go ask somebody in a VP squadron. They will then laugh at you and tell you to get lost, especially if you ask an AW. A REAL AW, not one of those guys with the dumb letter attached...

What? They all have letters now? OK whatever. You will know if you get a real AW.

Anyways...on with getting fatter!

Monday, February 2, 2015

Pork. BBQ. Smoked meat. What more could you ask for? As soon as you walk in and smell this place, you automatically want everything on the menu. Unless you're a vegan, in which case you didn't come within 100 miles of this place. Just so you know, if you're a vegan, my food shits on your food.

Today (and for the next two weeks), I am travelling with Danny and Alex. Danny is Vietnamese and Alex is Chinese. Don't ask me, I didn't name them. I do know that when Alex drives, we nearly die at least 10 times on the way to wherever we go to eat. Truth. He's from Hawaii and cant handle speeds above 45 mph.

Danny got: 3 meat combo with ribs, chopped beef, and brisket
Alex got: pork ribs
I got: 4 meat combo with pork ribs, brisket, pulled pork, and hot sausage

There were sides too, but it was just greens and okra so we can leave those out. They were good. Pretty much everything was really, really good except the pulled pork and chopped beef. That stuff was just "good" instead of "really, really good". The pork ribs were great in a way where they didn't fall off the bone into a large pile of, well, pulled pork, but they didnt stick to the bone either. Brisket was not dry (bonus) and had a deep smoke ring.

Speaking of smoke, I asked a guy that worked there what wood they used, and I got 30 seconds of blank stare followed by, "...ummmm I dunno". We cut him some slack, because if he were actually a rocket scientist, he wouldn't be working at a BBQ place.

Consensus: 3.5 out of  5 stars (sorry, gig for the chopped/pulled meat), would repeat.