I consider Sonic to be a seller of (quoting Michael Pollan) edible food-like products.
Gato! You are a bad man. 
Check’s in the mail…
An overcooked hamburger at a hole in the wall place in Manhattan.
it was more like a pus pocket than what you’re alluding to…
Paging Dr. Pimple Popper
I like the goat meat I’ve had in the Caribbean. As for it being boney, I think that is how they butcher goat, chicken, iguana, etc. They don’t cut the animal up into parts like we’re used to. No breast/leg/wing, rather they just hack the animal up with a cleaver.
I love good goat meat, but the goat has to be fairly young.
So Friday, a friend and I went to The Sample Room in Minneapolis. It’s in an old place in a grungy section of the city. However it has had rave reviews. It’s also the first place Anthony Bourdain reviewed in his first show. Servings are indeed little more than sample size, but since that has been a normal meal for me for ages, not a problem. My friend had a delicious flank steak in a chimichurri sauce. I hate a camel spare rib. Just one, but camels are big. The sauce it came in was rich and delicious. The spare rib meat had been removed from the bone, an easy task as it was falling apart. Interesting. It reminded me of elk or bison, but was quite stringy and tough. Unsurprising though, it was a spare rib after all. I’ll have to go back and try a different cut.
Menu changes every week or two, hence the name of the place. The chef sure is having fun.
I just remembered a bad meal experiences at a place where I expected much better.
Went to a restaurant several years ago in SE Michigan called The Masters, modeled after the Masters Clubhouse in Altanta, GA. Very fancy, nice looking place inside and out. Ordered the Steak Oscar, which is (or should be) a nice steak with crab meat on top covered in hollandaise sauce.
What I got was, meat that had already been cut up into bite-sized pieces for some reason, as if I were a child. I don’t know if they did it to camouflage that it was a small portion of beef or if it was so tough they sliced it thin to make it more edible. Topping the meat slices was the very cheapest grade of mechanically separated canned crab meat that had a stale, metallic taste as if they stored the leftover portion still in the can after opening, just putting saran wrap on top and throwing it in the cooler. The sauce was maybe Campbell’s Cream of Something soup with some kind of artificial lemon flavoring that tasted like Lemon Pledge. It was awful.
I just googled the place and they have 4-1/2 stars with over 1,200 Google reviews, so maybe they upped their game since then.
In reading this, along with our ongoing sidejack about the old saw of not ordering the steak/seafood at a seafood/steak place, I do always wonder about how much the restaurant in question sucks, as opposed to how much a particular dish at a restaurant sucks.
One thing I liked about the COVID era reorganization of some restaurants is that a number dropped IMHO excess choices off their menus. Sure, it’s a cost saving measure first and foremost, but I think all of us observe that the further something is from a place’s core dishes, the less likely you are to be impressed.
Especially during the 90-s to aughts, a lot of places started trying to add a strong chicken or fish side menu as people began the slow trend of eating healthier, and in all of the cases the dishes were sub-par in quality ingredients, cooking skill, and freshness.
You forgot the asparagus.
When I was a kid, there was restaurant in Santa Monica called The Broken Drum (You can’t beat it). I went there for my birthday dinner – my choice – and had the Veal Oscar. Man, that was so goooood. I still remember that meal. And I can’t find Oscar anything anywhere anymore. Sigh.
Vegas. It’s a standard addition at just about every steakhouse.
Speaking of which, SW Steak and Lakeside Grill at Wynn are the exceptions to the “Don’t order seafood at a steakhouse/Don’t order steak at a fish place.” That’s because they cheat and share a large kitchen for both restaurants.
I think I dislike Vegas more than I like Veal Oscar. If I’m ever strong-armed into going again I’ll look for it.
No, they forgot the asparagus. I don’t even remember what lame vegetable came with it on the side. Probably peas and carrot cubes from a can.
I later found out that my sister had gone there and ordered Chicken Piccata - she got a rubbery piece of chicken with the same Campbell’s Cream of Something soup and artificial Lemon Pledge flavoring, with an inexplicable side of southwest style rice- with tomatoes and bell peppers.
To be ranking 4-1/2 stars now, either the place got a “Kitchen Nightmares” style upgrade, or they spend a lot of money on fake positive Google reviews these days.
That was a typo. I HAD a camel spare rib. I by no means hated it. Sorry. 
This triggered a memory. The only time I remember eating at the Broken Drum in al my years in Santa Monica, I was on a first date with a guy who spent the entire meal trying to sell insurance to the waitress. I was watching the basketball game on the TV over his shoulder and glad to have something to do; no idea what I ate. Sorry for the side trip but it did all come back to me just now!
There are so many of these old restaurants that I really miss.
I remember another big restaurant letdown when I expected much better. It was a family trip to Washington D.C. about 7 or 8 years ago. We went to dinner at “Red Hot and Blues” in Arlington, VA. I knew the place was a chain which used to have at least one location in my home state of Michigan, but had never eaten there. Being a chain, I didn’t have high expectations at first of the quality of the BBQ, but the Arlington location was the original. An “About” section of the menu described how a few Southern politicians started the place when they couldn’t find a good BBQ joint in the D.C. area. The table had several squeeze bottles with different regional styles of BBQ sauce, which I took to be a good sign that they knew what they were doing. I allowed myself to get my hopes up and ordered the brisket, the ultimate test of a good BBQ place.
What I got was thin slices, deli-meat style, of tough, almost inedible beef. It was like the worst batch of lunchmeat ever. And to make matters worse, it came already slathered with a ton of Open Pit brand quality, KC-style BBQ sauce all over it. Why have bottle of different regional sauces on the table at all then? Arby’s does brisket better.
I guess either they didn’t have time or didn’t bother to cook the brisket to temp to render out the collagen, so it was still tough to the point of inedibility. So they thin-cut it on a deli slicer and slathered it in sauce to try to camoflauge how bad it was.
Buffalo chicken mac and cheese my daughter ordered from a local diner. They overcooked ziti, squirted Velveeta cheese sauce on it, and dumped a few chunks of barely seasoned chicken on top. Unfortunately we got the food to go so and it wasn’t worth the effort to return and demand our money back. If we had dined in and they presented that I would have told them to take all of our meals back and we would have left.
Hey! Don’t you diss Open Pit!
But, yeah, that sounds all completely wrong.
Are you saying Open Pit is a respectable brand of BBQ sauce? I know you know your BBQ, so it must be if you think so.
I just picked it as an example of the most old-school, generic type of BBQ sauce I could think of, the stuff my dad brushed on everything in generous amounts on the grill when I was a kid. I haven’t actually tried it in a long time.