Restaurants should be Regulated for Food Quality

I'm guessing that it's only just that I should have to pay the price for eating so well on the first day of a recent trip by having one of the worst meals of my life on the last. Now, "worst meals of my life" is a pretty major achievement.... as my co-workers repeatedly taunt me, I'm not that young - that's a lot of meals. But I've really racked my brain - and this includes four years of institutional food in two boarding schools, one of which was in England where they served something called faggots!

Why is it that Americans allow their government to put cameras on street corners, wiretap their homes and have you undo your pants in airports but they won't force restaurants to shut down for the quality of food served. I'm talking here about The Hard Rock Cafe.

Now generally if a restaurant accepts a large group of people, in this case 50, on two days notice warning bells should go off. Two days, fifty people... what part of that does not scare you.

You could probably guess what was on this menu without so much as a hint. Yup, you're right - chicken, salmon, Caeser salad... and smashed potatoes. One of my colleagues thought "smashed" was a typo until I mentioned that it was actually a trendy food term for lightly crushing potatoes with a fork, maybe mixing in some herbs and butter for a "smashed" effect... maybe things were looking up.... or it could be a typo! uuhh hun.

Now, any place that can handle fifty people on two days notice (not to belabour a point) is doing something unnatural with it's chicken breasts.... and we won't speculate on the condition of the salmon. And it's never good when the chicken breast on the two plates to your left and right have the exact same shape as your own... one thing I have learned is that food, particularly meat, should not be uniform; not unless you're paying a $100 a plate and getting the personalized attention of Thomas Keller... and we weren't. The chicken was roughly equivalent to a latex doggy toy without the squeek.

And the service? Well, to the waiter's credit he did bring each of us two Corona every time we ordered more - though I'm pretty sure he was just trying to minimize his contact with us.

Afriend has suggested that I'm being overly harsh - that it's simply because I'm not accustomed to "family style" restaurants. I've been to a Hard Rock Cafe in Canada and while I'm not sure I'd ever seek one out, and granted it was five or six years ago, on relative terms it was to the Miami Hard Rock as Nobu is to the Sushi corner in your local Loblaws.

This is a place to avoid. It is a place that should cause you to sit up, take pen in hand, keyboard on lap, and bang out a letter to an American Congressman telling him to stop worrying so much about al Qaeda and start worrying about the fate of American "family style" restaurants. And next time you're with 50 other people heading out to dinner on two days notice, pause... hang back by yourself... and go to the hotel bar where they're bound to be bar nuts like yourself.