Am I insane for thinking that a grain bowl should have a decent proportion of, uh, grain?
I went out to dinner with friends on Saturday night to a Dorchester neighborhood bar and restaurant. I’m not going to name it, because I don’t like trashing places. The one time that I did, they kept contacting me to go back so they could make it up to me. I didn’t want to go back and the whole thing was very uncomfortable. Lesson learned.
But this has been sitting on my mind and bothering me for days now. The only way to get it out of my system is to write it out of me.
Looking at this dish pictured above, does this look like a grain bowl to you? It does not to me. It’s a green salad masquerading as a grain bowl. I know it’s almost Halloween, but I didn’t plan on getting tricked by my meal!
When I read the menu it seemed pretty straightforward. Here it is below from the website with slight descriptive edits.
“Grain Bowl: couscous, chickpeas, baby kale, feta cheese, cucumber, cherry tomato, Kalamata olives, pickled red onion, and tahini dressing with pan roasted salmon.”
The salmon was an extra that I added on, so the whole meal was $26.00. Not cheap, but a fairly typical price for dinner.
As someone who cooks a lot at home, I’m always very hopeful that what I have at a restaurant is way better or at least as good as what I could have prepared myself.
Based on the menu description, I expected that at the very least, a quarter to third of the dish would be grains and chickpeas. I often make this type of dish at home. I love harvest bowls! There was literally just a dusting of couscous and very few chickpeas underneath the greens. It was basically all greens.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve had some not great meals at restaurants, so I haven’t written about them. But this just seemed ridiculous.
Overall, the meal was good. This green salad was good. It’s just not what I ordered and not what was described on the menu. I even told our server. She asked to take it back, but I said that a side of couscous would be fine. I expected to get a fairly generous portion. Maybe a half a cup? Instead, I received about a quarter cup, if that.
I was shocked. Did they run out of couscous? Rationing chickpeas? Was it a new cook who didn’t know what a grain bowl was and didn’t see the menu description? Good lord why?!
The place had a nice ambience, our server was very attentive and friendly, so I separated my thoughts about the meal from her tip. It wasn’t her fault.
I was so looking forward to a night out with friends. And the three of us had somehow managed to arrange this dinner at the last minute. It was like a miracle! I hadn’t seen them in a while and the most important part was our gathering together. With all that’s happening in the world, the news breaks our hearts a little more everyday.
But my sadness won’t make things any better. So it’s especially important to enjoy my loved ones while I can.
In the greater scheme of life, this grain bowl fiasco could not be more trivial. But the restaurant industry takes the customers as they find them and I was looking for at least what I had seen on the menu.
