Some restaurants have a strange way of say placing your order or finding out how to get your food but over time, as you figure it out, your ok with it and the foods pretty good?
For example we go to this place in downtown Kansas City called the Mongolian Grill. Its a semi Asian restaurant where what you do is go thru a sort of salad bar type line where you put lots of different meat, vegetables, spices, oils, and such into a bowl. Then you go to the grill and put your bowl on the counter then the guys on the grill put it on and cook up your order. Within about 5-10 minutes your order is cooked and they put it on a plate for you.
Now the trick is figuring out the right ingredients and spices to get the flavor you want. Say you want spicy or hot or sweet or whatever and what goes good with that flavor. It takes going back a a few times.
Then their is some chaos as several people have their orders cooking up so you have to keep an eye on your food and be ready to take your plate when its done. You can always spot the new people struggling to figure it all out.
It really kind of takes a knack to get used to but over time its become our favorite restaurant.
Tokyo Delve in North Hollywood. It’s crazy loud sake fueled sushi party. Servers forcing sake bombs on you. Singing and dancing on the tables coyote ugly style. Not the best sushi, but decent. Worth doing at least once or twice.
That sounds like a place I would frequent if I still drank. Coyote Ugly is my 2nd favorite movie behind Cocktail.
I have never seen either of those flicks and would likely hate them if I did. But the restaurant actually sounds like a fun place to be moderately drunk.
You walk in the door and you are immediately standing in the way of every server because of the way the building is set up. Sometimes, according to yelp, the people are rude because you are standing like a dope in the middle of the walkway, but what else were you supposed to do?
It is kind of a funky set up, and the people that work there are…unusual. My family looks sort of non-traditional, so I’m not sure if they treated us differently because we look like oddballs too, but our experience was awesome, and the food was excellent-we all had something different and it was all terrific. At the end of the meal the server (who might have been the owner/operator as well?) offered to comp our bill if I would give her my necklace…which added to the weirdness, but it is a really cool necklace so …
There’s a small chain of Italian restaurants here in the Chicago area, called Leona’s. I’ve been to several of their locations over the years; without fail, the service was slow, the waiters were on the spacey side, and at least one person in our group would have their order screwed up the first time it came out. The food was excellent, but it was almost like “crappy service” was considered a feature, rather than a bug.
When my wife and I were first married, we lived a few blocks away from their Oak Park location. We quickly agreed that we would never eat there (but we frequently got carryout).
I remember going to Chicago years ago and there was this pizza place that encouraged graffiti. They even gave out chalk so people could write stuff everywhere.
In Beijing years ago, there was a Uighur neighborhood where proprietors of restaurants would see a taxi going down the street, run to the cars, try to open the doors and try to hustle patrons out of the cab and into their restaurant.
When I ate at one of them, I literally saw two brief cases full of cash being counted and exchanged. Completely like something out of a movie.
And the food was simply incredible. The grilled lamb was a taste of heaven (and as spicy as Hades).
But, the government decided that the neighborhood was undesirable, so they distributed flyers to all the residents that they had a few months to move to make way for some real estate development. And sure enough, within a few months, the couple of blocks that comprised this fascinating street was completely leveled to the ground.
