Information: Restaurant Reviews

Once in a while you just have to order a pizza and have it delivered. I mean really why go out in the crazy windy weather when you can pay a delivery driver to do it for you.

It was one of those nights a few weeks ago. The wind was crazy Tele, Baby Girl and I were hungry and pizza was the food of choice. So we went to Dominos.com to place our order. Everything was as usual until I finished the order and it gave me the option to track our order.

At first I thought that it was a pretty silly idea, but I tried it out anyhow. I found out that it is totally cool. You actually get to see the names of the people who are preparing your pizza and delivering it. You get update statuses as the pizza goes from one step to the next. It even tells you when it is being boxed up for delivery.

This tracking of the pizza order detail has made Dominos our favorite pizza delivery company.

Go Dominos!

another review, placeholder.

Let me start by saying I'm a big fan of Italian food, it being ingrained in my DNA like a dormant disease, waiting to activate and cause me to jump head first into a boiling pot of Rigatoni. As such, I am insanely critical of Italian style restaurants, so you can rest assured that any review I do on an Italian restaurant will be very objective.

That being said, I truly enjoyed our meal from 3 Tomatoes and a Mozzarella. It started out as us wanting sushi, and we were headed to the Kobe on Rainbow and I-215 here in Las Vegas. In the same shopping center, there is a 3TaaM (the abbreviation I'm using for this restaurant). I was intrigued, and as much as I was longing to stuff my gullet full of raw Snapper, I had to try it.

We ordered three items, the Bruschetta appetizer, a vegetable panini-style sandwich, and a spinach salad with grilled onion dressing.

The sandwich was a very good combination of grilled vegetables with a balsamic vinegar glaze. It had a very

I would love to tell you all what I ate at Kobe, but I really have no idea. Now you may be thinking of course you have no idea it has been almost a month since you ate there. Well, that really has nothing to do with it. I didn't remember what I ate when I left there either.

Here is the problem. Once the fish is cut and put on to a piece of rolled up rice, it all looks the same to me; except for Tai which looks extremely different from the tuna.

So all I know is that I ate a lot of raw fish. Included in that line up was at least 4 pieces of Tai (Red Snapper), some Toro (Fatty Tuna), probably some Maguro (Tuna) and Albacore (White Fish), and one order of Hotategai (Scallops wrapped in Nori). I also had some Philadelphia and Cucumber Rolls and an order of Tomago (Egg Nigiri).

As you can see I ate a lot. I could have sat there longer and eaten more, but that would get mighty expensive.

After we left Kobe we went to the Orange Pearl Yogurt Store where I got a Strawberry Mango Smoothie. That helped to finish filling me up.

I have to say that Kobe is where I first fell in love with Tai. I had liked sushi before the Tai, but I did not yet have a love for it. Then I decided to order Tai. It came out looking different from the other fish. It is white with a slight red color to one side of it. And a slice of lemon tops it. Tai has a sweetness to it that is remarkable. If you aren't sure about sushi or have not yet fallen in love with it I must suggest trying Tai. It may convert you for life (I'm talking to you too Mrs. Savory!).

Kobe I love you and your Tai! I'll be back soon.

Well, as Tele has previously posted, the other night we went to Kobe. I think its a fine little sushi bar, and I must say that while I was there I fell in love with Red Snapper. That's some awesome fish, I tell you what.

The problem, however, is as much as I love sushi, I can almost never eat enough of it. I can eat .. well.. quite a bit more than I logically should be able to eat, and I fear that it's my voracious appetite that will condemn me to a) not eat enough at a sushi bar, b) eat so much at a sushi bar that the itamae and I have to battle in hand to hand combat because they have nothing left in the restaurant to eat, or c) I've eaten so much sushi that the Pacific ocean is declared devoid of life. A good example, is what I had to eat today. I had the following to eat:

• 4 cups of coffee
• 1 cup of tea
• 5 bottles of water (16 oz)
• 4 sandwiches
• 1 cup cheese popcorn
• 2 truffles
• 1 pear
• 1 stuffed pork chop
• 1 baked potato
• 1 bowl of cinnamon apples
• 1 bowl of coffee icecream

At the sushi place, if I recall correctly, I had:

• 5 pc cucumber roll
• 5 pc philadelphia roll
• 4 hamachi (yellow tail)
• 2 red snapper
• 2 crab roll
• 3 cups green tea
• 1 16oz sake

and we went out for frozen yogurt afterwards, in which I had a 16oz plain with pomegranate seeds.

I think I have a tapeworm. He and I understand each other.

So, there's this sushi bar down the street, on Flamingo and Fort Apache. The itamae there are part of some sort of sushi cabal, and they look at you like you're a freak if you can't put away at least fifty bucks worth of sushi in a single sitting. (For the record, that's about eight or nine orders of nigiri. You could choke a small dog with that.)

Savory, Tarthead, and I, brave adventurers all, decided to brave the rapids there. Savory was my secret weapon, my revenge for getting the you no eat sushi very often look. In the course of a typical workday, I've seen Savory pack away four donuts, two submarine sandwiches, and a plate of pad thai. Like most men with the capability to ingest several times their own mass in meat, he's freakishly small.

After dropping off the kids with a random stranger, we converged upon the restaurant and were presented with one of those sushi tick mark sheets.

I hate those sheets. First of all, I'm perfectly capable of ordering sushi in Japanese (I don't speak Japanese, but I do speak sushi). Second of all, with three people, two tick marks can be easily mistaken for an eleven. I've seen people mow through eleven orders of hamachi nigiri before, so that is totally not an uncommon scenario. And thirdly, yes, please, let us all handle a piece of random paper and then hand it to the guy who touches the uncooked belly meats that go in your mouth.

All of this has nothing to do with this particular sushi restaurant. I just need to rant sometimes. And it's going to be freaky in the future when you have to ICQ your itamae just to get your maguro pronto.

Anyways, having been given the paper bullet, we had to plan ahead. No problem; by the time we all had one order of something to eat, we had a traffic pile-up of little plates. This is a situation that the Japanese call frickin awesome.

And the fish? Yeah. The fish was great. I wouldn't say they're particularly above par on the fish I like to eat (for instance, the closer Hikari sushi bar has the best, butteriest yellowtail ever invented). The unagi was pretty standard, the tuna, delicious. Of course, I didn't order what the others ordered, and I can tell you they both have a pretty hefty recommendation for you. When they get around to posting...

Romano's Macaroni Grill 2001 N Rainbow Blvd Las Vegas, NV 89108

Teleolurian It must have been a busy night.

When we got to the Macaroni Grill, we faced the usual line-out-the-door setting that you get when you decide to go to a popular restaurant on the spur of the moment. Since I wanted to review the food, I decided to forego showing off my crayoned press pass and instead settled in for the half-hour wait.

In recent years, the Grill has gotten quite the menu facelift. Dining here is now more in the vein of classical Italian signature dishes and less of an upscale Olive Garden; however, the prices are still decent, with most dishes in the $10-$20 range.

Upon reaching our table, the server informed us that they were out of bread dishes and wine glasses, finding us some tumblers for drinking the house Red. Luckily, I'm not a bouquet snob, so I used the wine for fuel as I wrote scathing commentary ("she's just using you for your bed") on the paper tablecloth. With a communal bread plate, oil and balsamic vinegar, and an unspoken no-double-dipping rule, we sat around and chatted while our dishes came out.

For me, it was chicken scallopine ($9.49)- a bit heavy, but absolutely superb. The lemon-butter sauce didn't wimp out on the lemons, and the capers were heavily drenched and therefore delicious. Tender was the chicken, and tasty; the leftovers were even rather tender the next day (something you don't get in, say, a country steakhouse).

Savory Masochist

Ding dong the traditional dish is dead. Wait. no. I just didn't get one.

After we got our red wine in tumblers and tore off a few chunks of bread, I decided to go with a build-your-own pasta deal. Macaroni Grill offers these little checklists that you insidiously mark as if you were building your own Frankenstein. I decided on a Penne, with Tomato Cream sauce, and Sun Dried Tomatoes, Roasted Red Peppers, Pine Nuts, and Chicken. It was pretty good, although I can't say as I would get it again. It's my own fault really, for just hitting rand when I was looking at the menu. Oh well. The company was good and we hadn't had a date night in near a decade, so it made up for my pasta. After that, we wrote some generally strange things on the table paper, and we were off! to another crazy adventure.

Oh, I would write a longer review, however Tele pegged most of it in his.

Queen of Tarts
Okay, so when Macaroni Grill opened they had food that was so-so. In recent years the flavors had been stepped up and they redeemed themselves, until...that fateful night. If we offered to do the dishes I think they might have allowed us to do so. They were obviously understaffed being the day after Christmas, but no bread plates and no wine glasses wasn't the end of it. When the SM put in his original order it included artichokes. The waiter had to come back and let us know that they were out of those too. Apparantly not only did we need to do our own dishes, but we needed to go do our own grocery shopping for the ingredients before arriving at the resturaunt. Crazy!

Usually if I am at an Italian place I automatically order manicotti (if its Mexican then it is a bean and cheese burrito enchilada style), but I am trying to branch out a bit. So, on this evening I ordered Chicken Cannelloni (Hand-rolled pasta stuffed with oven-roasted chicken, melted cheese and spinach, then baked in an Asiago cream sauce. Topped with tomato sauce) for $9.99. The dish smelled and looked wonderful. I immediatly dug in and ate one out of the three stuffed pastas. Half way through the second shell I started to wonder "Where is the chicken?" I am a "recovering vegitarian" (as Tele calls it) so it really didn't bother me that I couldn't taste it or find it until I realized I am paying for chicken I can't find. Must find the chicken. So I tore apart the third shell in search for chicken. I eventually found a small sliver of shredded chicken. If this was Iron Chef the plate wouldn't have gotten high marks for the "theme ingredient" being the dominant flavor. Overall the taste of my dish was excellent, but I was dissapointed that with the name Chicken Cannelloni the chicken was not easy to find in the dish.

I have not given up on the Macaroni Grill yet because I must say that there bread rocks (mmm, bread), but I hope to never have the lack of service that we had that night again.