Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Dining in Mobile

First time in Mobile, Alabama this week. Hmm, gotta say there wasn't a lot there to compel me to return.

Having said that, we had a purty good dinner Monday night at Felix's Fish Camp near the U.S.S. Alabama battleship memorial. The service was great as were the seasoned oysters, the brews, and a Greek-style redfish. They had a great singer/geetar-picker who also played harmonica. He played covers, but he played and sang exceptionally well. And the house sound was just right - enough to hear him but not so loud as to drown out dinner conversation.

For Tuesday dinner, we decided to simply go to Baumhowers Wings, a local, recommended sports themed restaurant. I won't call it a "sports bar" because the place was too big and the menu too varied to be considered a bar. I will preface everything else by saving our server was great.

But the reading of the menu and trying to get an interpretation from this nice server made me think we were under a full moon. For example...
  • Under the Soup & Salad listing, they had about 10-12 different salads - but no soups. It took 3 of us to finally see the small writing "ask your server about today's soups". So we did...
  • We were told the soup choice of the day was ... chili. That's not a soup. Its chili! Then for good measure she added "well, we also have gumbo if you want that." Again, gumbo is not a soup.
  • The menu also advertised a "Tuesday special - ask your server". Again, we tried. We really did. "What's the Tuesday special we're supposed to ask you about?" The reply was somewhat predicable. "Well, sometimes we do have Tuesday specials - especially during football season. But not this Tuesday." Now as Forrest Gump said so eloquently "well Jenny, I'm not a smahrt man..." But last I checked (1) it isn't football season and (2) even in football season Tuesday night is not a big football night.
  • Having learned the Tuesday special...wasn't... I turned my focus to their chicken wings. They offered a wide variety of sauces - including lemon-pepper. At least that's what the menu said. I told her that's what I wanted as my wing sauce. She then told me it wasn't a sauce - just lemon-pepper seasoning ON a sauce. So I had to ask "then why is it included under sauces if its just a seasoning?" She looked at me like I had 3 eyes, avoided answering my question, and instead recommended I get the wings sampler appetizer where I could try 3 different sauces. I asked if I could get lemon-pepper with the sampler & she said yes. So I figured I'd try again. (I was beginning to have fun with this whole deal.) "The lemon pepper is a sauce on the sampler - just not with the regular wings order?" Her reply was "no, its still just a seasoning but you get 2 other sauces to go with it." Its been a full 24 hours after the meal, I've returned home to Tennessee, and and I still have no clue about why a seasoning was listed as a sauce when it wasn't.
  • Having said all that - the waitress truly did the best she could I suppose and never lost her sense of humor.
TMC

5 comments:

  1. I don't think lemon pepper would be good on wings anyway.

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  2. Holy cow, when I was a server we ran from tables like yours...!!! :)

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  3. I never liked Mobile. I think it was because we had some family who moved down there and they acted like it was heaven. (This is a general tendency of people from Alabama, but I don't want to go stirring up trouble.)

    I will say that there was one restaurant/bar I found there, but I forget the name. It was west of the airport--on the south side of whatever that main highway is that runs through Mobile, maybe U.S. 90--between the airport and I-65. When I had to go to Mobile a good bit after Katrina, people got tired of eating there with me every night.

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  4. I blame our Wings service on Katrina. Nice rundown of the dinner festivities... pretty acurate.

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  5. um, Chase - you left out the question and answer session we had with David. That was some great entertainment...

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