I guess we'll just make this a trilogy of T/A reviews?
Along with the burgers I just reviewed, I tend to include the soup and salad bar. Some times the dinner I order it comes with it. Other times when I'm just getting a burger or sandwich I'll add it on. There have been a few surprises, both good and...interesting..at T/A salad bars and I just wanted to touch on a few.
First since it's fresh in my mind because I ate there twice in the last 24 hours, the T/A in Hurricane WV (west of Charleston on I-64 if you need some kind of reference point).
Oh before I forget, here they offered crumbled blue cheese that you could put on your salad. Unless this is a new item chain-wide, I've never seen it before so of course instead of the regular shredded cheese I opted for this instead. Loved it!
While browsing and assembling my salad I noticed a very peculiar item that once again, I had never seen before. It was bright pink and by buffet and salad bar standards it looked like it could have been some kind of pink butter. or a thick strawberry flavored whipped cream. The serving spoon was seriously stuck in the container to where I had to use two hands to get it out! One hand on the spoon, the other on the edge of the container. Then when I tried to put some on my plate, it was sticking like glue to the spoon. I couldn't get it to fall, drop or even plop (is that a good word to describe consistency, how ploppy it is?). I had to load up the spoon and then scrape it off with the edge of my salad plate (actually soup cup is what I used but you get the idea). Back at my table I tried it...it was pudding! Well, it was pudding-like. It didn't look like pudding. The strawberry had a great flavor to it, it was actually really good. The following day brought the return of the pink stuff and an introduction of brown stuff too which turned out to be chocolate pudding....ish. Both, despite their weird appearance and thickness and texture, were actually pretty good. Two thumbs up!
Next is a T/A I seem to stop at regularly on the way up to Canada: Binghamton NY (I-81 near the NY/PA border). The photo of what I lovingly called "Loch Ness Soup" from an earlier blog entry came from this location. It had a cheese base but then whatever was lurking under the surface was a mystery to everyone. Veggies, maybe some form of meat in small pieces. I think there was a lone piece of diced potato in there as well. The soup was labelled "Chef's Special" which to me means 'this stuff is going bad soon, we have to get rid of it some how'.
On the flip side, a few weeks later they had a fantastic soup that blew me away. It looked to me what I thought was Italian Wedding Soup. I found out later real Wedding Soup has green veggies and this soup had a variety. It also had meatballs, well, halved meat balls but it was still in there. It was seasoned well, it had a good meatball count, it had a nice pleasing mixture of veggies that weren't cumbersome of tried to shove other veggies off the spoon. It was fantastic! I had seconds of it, I couldn't get enough. I loved it so much I even sent a tweet to T/A and raved about it. It was, in fact, that good.
Another hit from another T/A is in Earle AR (I-30 between Little Rock and Texarkana but closer to Texarkana if that makes any sense). Two surprises here is that first they offered a ceasar salad on the soup/salad bar along with the regular salad. And if you needed more dressing, they even had a little tub of ceasar salad dressing next to it if you wanted extra. What I really loved, and it's not much but it was an interesting touch for me, was different kinds of butter. Along with the regular plain butter they also offered a honey butter which was fantastic and a cajun butter which had potential for sure but I didn't really see anything it would go with other than the rolls. I'm more of a honey butter fan myself but I did try the cajun butter which was also good, just not exactly my cup of tea.
I know it's not a T/A but I'd like to give a special mention to the Petro in Atlanta GA for putting hominy on their salad bar. I've never had hominy before and it looked like someone took white corn, peeled off the outer hard layer and soaked it in water to make it bigger. As it turns out, that's exactly what hominy is..who knew? I didn't really detect any kind of flavor to it, but it was still interesting and fun to try nonetheless.
Also a weird quirk of mine for the last year or so has been adding a small slice of pickled beet to my salad. Last year I thought it would be a good idea to try a few other things, add some new-to-me items from the salad bar onto my plate from time to time, who knows maybe I'll like it. Well, I've been adding a small slice of pickled beet onto my salad for a year now and let me tell you...I still don't like it. Why do I keep doing it? Habit! It doesn't feel like my trip to the salad bar is complete unless that little slice of picked beet is sitting there waiting for me to try it and remind myself that I don't like pickled beets. My dad does though. He can have them. I also tried a little bit of green bean salad today in Hurricane and, yeah, no. Not a fan.
So yeah, I can say nice things about T/A restaurants when it's warranted and deserving!
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