Located on Park Boulevard inside the old Gulf Coast Grill space.
We ate their yesterday. I had the sausage plate with alligator and camel. David had the same, with bison and boar. The food was delicious. The camel sausage was a new one for me. The texture was…I guess…soft? A subtle, earthy flavor, like a mushroom. Sausage generally has some rich body, but the camel had a feel more like liver.
And then there was the service.
If you have ever seen the Portlandia episode in which a young lady tries desperately to order a pastrami sandwich, only to be directed and then redirected a thousand times to various ordering stations to specify different parts of her order…it reeked of that scene. We ordered at the front counter, and then sat ourselves. The very friendly waiter zipped over and showed us their table tent with all these different cards. One that said “service,” which would indicate we needed, uh, service. One that said “check,” another with, “scram,” meaning, leave us alone. He was perfectly fine, but the whole table tent explanation was kitschy and ridiculous. I thought, good grief, part of service is the art of SERVICE, not expecting a customer to spoon feed the wait staff with cue cards.
In any event, it was small annoyance. The staff was clearly a solid bunch and knowledgable about the product. We will go back.
The last time I had to put up a sign (literally) to get service was when I was in high school in Milwaukee. It seemed to us that they didn’t like “kids” showing up in certain restaurants. (Think, Bob’s Big Boy.) I was working as a stock boy at a department store and one of my jobs was to make signs for the various merchandise racks, so I made up a sign that said “We are paying customers. You can serve us now!” It was about 5 x 8 inches, and we’d stand that up on the table. Didn’t help.
This kind of thing is really, really kitschy, as you said. Never heard of anything like it here in SD. Hope S&M drops that. (And, while being critical of kitschy things and such, are they not familiar with the common meaning of the name of their restaurant?)
