If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know that I try to avoid chain restaurants whenever possible. I believe that you should spend as many dining dollars as you can with your local mom and pop restaurants--not only are you stimulating your local economy, but you're probably getting better food as well as a much better return for your dining dollar.
Chain restaurants by design tend to be boring and overpriced. This is what happens when you try to make it so that your location in Sacramento serves the exact same lobster ravioli dish as your location in Toronto. To ensure quality and consistency in different geographic areas with different support staff, most of the food ends up prepackaged and shows up at the restaurant already prepared. Does your dinner at a chain restaurant taste like a TV dinner? In a way, that's what it is.
One of my friends in high school worked at a very large national restaurant chain as a chef. Despite this, he still needed my help when he decided to cook a very simple dinner for his family. He (and others I've spoken to after him) said that his job at the restaurant qualified him for nothing food related except for being a very highly skilled microwave jockey.
That being said, there are a few chain restaurants I actually like. Outback Steakhouse makes me very happy, as they hit a good price point with their meals and must be using a much better beef supplier than most other steakhouses. And the Outback Style spice is like crack, seriously. I think it's made from the same place as Popeye's Cajun Sparkle spice (another seasoning I could eat straight). Actual and I are also partial to Buca di Beppo, as they are very generous with their portions and vary their menu enough that's there is always something new to try out. And that... was the end of the Chomple acceptable chain restaurants list.
Until now.
I've had meals at McCormick & Schmick's before, a while ago in other cities. I remember them being very good but had totally forgotten about them until they opened one here in Roseville. Actual and I needed a place to eat lunch, and Actual was once again demanding "white people food" as her Asian food fatigue was at a record high. So off we went.
The first thing you will notice at this place is that they print their menu every day to reflect what's been flown in fresh. I think this is partially pretty cool but partially a gimmick. It's not like this place is next to a fish market and they are selling whatever the fish mongers have dragged in from the dock. Like any other chain restaurant, McCormick & Schmick's is using their team of buyers around the world to buy in extreme bulk and shipping a portion to each location. As this happens, the inventory is analyzed by their test kitchen at HQ and the recipes for what's about to arrive are beamed to their locations as well as the menu they will be sporting that day. Mind you, I don't know if any of this is actually true, but past experience in this industry leads me to believe it is.
Regardless of how much I think this might be a gimmick, it also means that the menu varies by day and that they are using fresh ingredients, which is something I can't say about most other chain restaurants. Once you've been to enough meals at chain restaurants, you start to be able to pick out which entrees are precooked and which are actually made fresh onsite. I can say that the McCormick's menu very much leans to the "made here" side... well, except for the "Lunch Entrees" portion of their menu, which obviously is made up of McFood that looks mysteriously like the lunch menu everywhere else.
The waitress was really pushing the drinks hard. Actual decided to spring for an Arnold Palmer. It's quite a small miracle when a chain restaurant decides to make lemonade with fresh lemons, especially when that lemonade is going to be blended into another drink. The drink was actually worth it, it was extremely crisp and refreshing.
Having craved oysters for about a month now (and having been terribly underwhelmed by the oysters at Esquire Grill), I ordered the large oyster sampler. This was the best thing I've eaten in a few weeks. It's rare to find raw oysters on the menu anywhere in the Sacramento area, and when you do there's usually only one unspecified type. My only problem with this dish, and it was a big one, was that they seem to have no quality control check at the raw bar. Check out the Pearl Bay oyster... second one down on the right. That's not an oyster inside the shell... it's the thin outer membrane of an oyster. No respectable raw bar should EVER let anything like that go out. To their credit, they did replace it, but neither the shucker nor the waitress caught it, and they both should have.
Actual got their market salad. She said it was good. It was nothing special, although their balsamic dressing is pretty good.
Next up was my seafood corn chowder. It was absolutely loaded with seafood, but it was rather overpriced for the portion size. Note that this is not a discounted addon, when your waitress asks you if you want to add it to your meal, you are paying the full menu price.
Entree time. I got the cashew encrusted tilapia with Jamaican rum sauce. Now, this was a tough choice. I hadn't seen rockfish on the menu for years and I was delighted that I had the chance to order it. I usually don't get tilapia, it's rather boring and everybody serves it--it's a miracle they aren't using it for fast food fish sandwiches. That being said, I couldn't turn down a Jamaican rum sauce. I was not disappointed, this dish was the best cooked fish dish I've had in about six months.
I was especially impressed that this dish was cooked on location, as this is something that you could probably cook, freeze in an industrial kitchen and send to your restaurant. Here's a sort of surefire way to figure this out: what is the temperature of the inside of the dish like? If it's just warm, they've probably just reheated it, the inside doesn't get the opportunity to get too hot because they don't want to burn the outside which is already precooked, also since it's precooked they don't give a crap about getting the meat up to temperature. If the inside of the dish is oh my god hot, they've probably actually cooked it when you ordered it.
This is Actual's seafood jambalaya. I've had some great jambalaya in NO, and this stuff was just as good (not kidding, it really was). And talk about full of seafood... there was more seafood than rice in this dish. The crawfish on top is named Jake. Apparently the original McCormick's was called Jake's Crawfish House or something like that, so they name all of their served whole seafood Jake. We thought it was hilarious, but I hope they don't give that spiel to small children.
Dessert time. The tray came out and Actual, while already full, needed to pick something as they all looked very good. Something we were very interested in but didn't get was the thing in the top of the picture. That's their upside down twice baked apple pie. Apparently they bake an apple pie, take it out, flip it over, glaze it, then bake it again. Sounds awesome, but we didn't get it because...
...on the way in Jody saw them carrying a very strange dessert to another table, something that wasn't on the dessert tray. Our waitress explained that was the chocolate bag. I've heard of the chocolate bag before, as more than one friend of mine that has gone through culinary school has complained of an instructor that makes people construct these to see whether or not they have a full grasp of how chocolate works. So this dessert is a bag made of chocolate, which is filled with chocolate mousse and strawberries, then surrounded by raspberry sauce.
Chocolate bag post assault.
So, do I wish there were some sort of mom and pop seafood restaurant around here? Sure, but then again that's unrealistic since I'm not living on a coast. Until that happens, I'm going to this place.
