This evening I had dinner at a local Austin, TX restaurant: Threadgill’s
Their menu claims that the house specialty is chicken fried steak with gravy. Seeing this and being in a home style cooked meal kind of mood, I jumped at the chance to find a worthy competitor to the reigning run-of-the-mill challenger, found today at Chili’s. The walls were lined with pictures of various singers and bands that had played at the establishment and some of the online reviews for the place looked good, so why not try the “world famous” chicken fried steak? It was, in a word, bad. It was plain, soggy, tasteless and completely inedible. This is what I had been waiting for having sat on a plane for nearly four hours and waiting for my stomach to catch up with the local time?
Thinking that somehow I might be expecting too much, I turned to the small mound of mashed potatoes slathered in white gravy sitting next to the steak. Again, it was a vanilla mass of chewy goo. I looked around and saw that everyone else was ordering burgers or salads, so that should have been my first clue as to the “famous” part of this food order.When the waiter came around again (he seemed too busy to notice a solitary guest in his area and actually topped off my Sprite with water) I told him that I couldn’t eat the dinner and that I’d like to order something else. Puzzled, he scurried off and appeared again with a menu. The moment it dropped onto the table he evaporated and he was not to be seen again for about 15 minutes. Taking a chance, I ordered the second mistake of the evening: the hickory burger. I made it clear to the waiter when he finally arrived that I wanted something that could be done relatively quickly since it was now within one hour of their closing time. He said this would be no problem, then disappeared again into the wind.
Nearly 20 minutes would pass before I would see him again, and when he did arrive he looked at me and seemed puzzled. Oh, he said, you don’t have your dinner do you? I didn’t answer, but instead chose to stare back at him with a look that indicated my displeasure for sitting nearly an hour in a restaurant with next to nothing to show for it. Eventually he did materialize with the so-called burger, but again I was met with a mass of utterly un-taste-worthy food. And by this statement I mean literally it had no taste. I could be chewing on chicken, pork, bark, leaves; it really had no taste or texture beyond the hickory sauce. The final insult was delivered by the fries which were so soggy and unappetizing as to be all but skipped over.
My point in all of this ranting is this: when faced with the option of choosing hotel food, a predictable but lame chain restaurant, or a quirky local establishment pick anything but the local establishment if they have the words “world famous” anywhere in their menu. Because frankly, I’ve been to some pretty distant parts of the world and I can’t tell how this food offering was anything close to famous.
 
