Iced Tea Report: Hungry's on Memorial Fails the Iced Tea Refill Test

If you can spot what's wrong with this glass of iced tea, you're doing better than the staff of Hungry's Café & Bistro on Memorial Drive in Houston, Texas.  (Reviews on Yelp)

Normally poor iced tea performance is balanced by something going right with the food, but the food came so slowly I am aware only that we avoided cannibalism, and can't really report with authority on how anything tasted because we'd gone feral.

Usually I stop at the Hungry's on Rice Blvd., where I'm sure the tea is larger and I've been able to persuade servers to keep it full.

Maybe next time.

Teotihucan's: Iced Tea Done Right

I met a friend and some business acquaintances for lunch at the Teotihucán Mexican Café.

Shortly after receiving an excellent salsa and a basket of nice, fresh chips, I was served the iced tea you see below:


Note that it comes with a lemon, a spoon that is an iced tea spoon, and a straw for those who, unlike me, don't discard them immediately.

The only downside was that on refill – and I note that refills were readily obtained the whole lunch – the servers tended to slowly pack the glass with ice so it became hard to stir sugar.

Great food with the tea, by the way.

GRADE: A

China Stix Doesn't Get Iced Tea

I ducked into China Stix* for dinner for starving children and learned that thousands of years of expertise in making tea doesn't help some Chinese fast food vendors to deliver a decent experience to iced tea customers.

(1) Overbrewed and bitter.
(2) You don't get refills but have to chase them yourself, which means that if you're with children you're S.O.L.
(3) They will hear you and nod to you when you ask for a tea spoon, but after three tries with different employees you still won't get a spoon suited to stirring tea into the plastic glasses they dispense for cold drinks. You will eventually end up trying to stir your tea with a knife (see photo).
(4) You will run out of little rice-flour pancakes for your honest-to-goodness Chinese dish – like the mu shu dish you read about in the review – and when that happens, the staff will nod like when you asked for a tea spoon but will, in fact, completely ignore your pleas for help.
(5) You will leave unhappy.

It is literally more convenient to brew it yourself. Only approach if dehydrated and traveling far from home.
Grade: F.

* --> There's apparently a restaurant by this name in California, which apparently won some local awards and whose web site reflects no connection to the Houston fast-food joint. My advice to the proprietors: sue for impairment of your valuable trademark.

Iced Tea Report: Ruggles

Friday night, some parents took their Kindergartners' teacher to a "nice dinner" at Ruggles' original restaurant location near Montrose. The event was held upstairs, the only plausible solution to the layout of the noisy restaurant, and an effective way to police the movement of the children: guard the stairs.

When we arrived, nobody took drink orders even as family after family arrived with children. Nobody took appetizer orders. It was an undirected mess for the better part of forty-five minutes while I walked around wondering who would take responsibility for ensuring that we were served. It took forever to get a waiter to come to our tables, and I knew the kids were at their limit.

The hunger-maddened children was my first order of business with the waiter.

"For the safety of your establishment," I began, "bring this girl --" and here, I pointed at a child who was past all patience but soldiering on like a champ "-- Mac and cheese as fast as it is possible for the kitchen to deliver." I gave this instruction before ordering anything at all. I kept pointing at the girl while I looked from the waiter to the girl and back to make sure he had directed his attention appropriately. I thought my point had been clearly made: this was an emergency.

After an eternity, one parent begged for some bread, or something, to aid the increasingly distressed children. By then some kids were past reason, unwilling to eat anything but what they'd ordered. Like the Mac and cheese ordered by my targeted would-be diner.

The girl held her abdomen as if in pain and said, "I'm hungry."

I found the waiter and urged him to do something about the kids' meals and the Mac and cheese I'd specifically requested be brought faster than anything else. He agreed.

Adults began receiving their appetizers, mine included, and I went in search of the waiter. I asked about the Mac and cheese. He said they were moving as fast as possible and he was doing everything he could.

The adults received their entrées. I tried to work with the little one about whom I was worried, and she was insensible. She was hungry past reason. She wept – literally wept.

I went asking after a manager, and found someone willing to enter the kitchen and ask for the Mac and cheese. Within a minute, Mac and cheese sat before all the kids who'd ordered it. One parent reported that from their arrival to their kids' receipt of food took an hour and forty minutes.

Then, I reached for my tea.

The big steak in the foreground of the photo on the left was well-favored, but I'd ordered it medium and it was delivered mostly well-done and therefore considerable drier in the middle than I am accustomed to eating and lacked the texture I expect in a quality steak. Despite the definitely-quality-steak price of the thing, I was starved and unwilling to wait again for food, and entirely unwilling to take up another customer service issue with the staff. The stress of telling people they've botched things when you are trying to have a sit-down dinner with your family and the kids' teachers is just not my idea of a good evening.

After a couple (2) of tea refills, they stopped sending anyone near enough to notice, or even to have their attention attracted to the state of my tea glass. So look carefully at the picture, paying special attention to the empty glass with the ice, lemon, and tea spoon: if you go to Ruggles, this will happen to you!

Eventually, dinner was completed around 8PM, and the kids needed to go home. Unfortunately, Ruggles doesn't help people get home with any more seal than they help people get food or iced tea. Those families that came in two cars split up: the bill was so slow coming that a paying adult was left to wait while the families took off for home and bed.

It took an hour from finishing dinner to see a bill. A dinner that "started" at 6PM didn't let me back to my car ($4 to valet, and no apparent parking anyplace) until after nine o'clock.

Everyone had pitched in to cover the teachers' bills, so they were together. Everyone else had a one-family bill. Nevertheless, despite the three- and four- and five-person checks, that characterized the room (we went so far as to place name tags on the table so the staff could tell whose bill they were serving), there was a 20% tip added. After an hour waiting, and with kids past sense, I had no possibility of spending time getting justice. The wretched service – one waiter for maybe thirty people who took up the entire upper floor of the restaurant, and not a very attentive waiter at that – wasn't worth 5%, except that I like to make sure the people who actually work get paid. (L's chicken was superb, but you won't want to suffer the rest of the experience to get it.)

By chance, I had a lunch date the next day at the more mainstream-priced Ruggles Café and Bakery in the Village on Rice Boulevard. I ordered a turkey Reuben and iced tea, with fruit substituted for the fried potatoes that are normally served with the sandwich.

The iced tea is self-serve, so you can get all the lemon and sugar and refills you care to pour. There is no tip tacked onto your bill, even when you eat with friends. If you are lucky enough to get a table close to the drink fountain, you can get refills without much hassle.

The picture on the left shows how Ruggles substitutes fruit in favor of fries.

My conclusion is that while there are outstanding elements at Ruggles' associated restaurants, there is no ethic of service at all, and the tea – despite being offered with lemon, a tea spoon, and even sugar in the raw – is a C at the main restaurant for want of service. It is a B+ at the Ruggles Café if you can get a table close enough to the drink fountain to make refills likely. (Otherwise you leave your company repeatedly to get refills, or forgo them, either of which greatly reduces the quality of your experience.)

Between the two, Ruggles Café is the one to visit. It is also vastly cheaper. You can easily get better service nearly anyplace else in town, though. For the price, what you get at Ruggles' main restaurant is awful.

Iced Tea Report: Danton's

Danton's sits at the southeast corner of Montrose and the Southwest Freeway in the same commercial development as Main Street Theater's Montrose location. When I visited May 14, parking was tight because so many school busses full of schoolkids, dressed by color so adults could sort them back into the right busses, had descended on the place to attend an event at Main Street Theater.

First, a word about Main Street Theater: See the shows. The ticket is much cheaper than at The Alley, and you won't be "treated" to some unheard-of new Mamet production whose main child lead sounds like he's reading the ingredients from a cereal box. (This is not to trash The Alley; its production of Proof was absolutely outstanding in a way the movie – which lacks the intermission cliffhanger – was at pains to achieve. But for The Alley's price, I expect consistency. I am now quite careful only to attend what is proven in advance to be worth seeing. At Main Street Theater, you can show up and see anything you please, without fear.) I took L to Main Street Theatre's production of Oscar Wilde's wildly entertaining The Importance of Being Earnest (best bought in a collection for many more hours of enjoyment; also now both a movie and an older movie), and there is only one way to put it: they nailed it. Main Street Theater has also done outstanding work with titles you've never heard of, such as the based-on-the-true-story play The Trust (now apparently a movie) which explains – to the widening eyes of locals who had no idea the story was so fraught with intrigue – how Rice University came to be funded.

But I was meeting a client for lunch at Dalton's: to time to stop for a show. Dalton's enjoys the same comfortable booths that have characterized the place since it was a steak joint run by an opera singer back before the Montrose bridge project cut off access to the property and, over a period of grueling months, suffocated the business in an ignominious death. Like many Houston restaurant locations, it's been the scene of a production whose tradition is much older than any ever cast at The Alley or Main Street: the survival of the fittest. Dalton's succeeds a string of fore-bearers in occupancy of the northwest corner of the southeast block of the intersection.

And the Jaded Consumer is here to tell you about the iced tea service at Danton's. As seen in the picture, Danton's serves a tall glass cylinder of tea as full of ice as drink, complete with lemon and ready for sweetening with a tea spoon and collection of sweeteners. The lemon is served on the edge of the glass so that one may – without need to fish in one's drink for the fruit slice – choose to ignore, remove, or squeeze the lemon into the tea. When the tea arrives, the sugar is already there – and present in sufficient quantities to service two refills before the need arises to request more. The refills come swiftly, and the skilled staff cares enough to honor your request not to overstuff the glass with ice as the tea is poured, so your second glass can be stirred without further intervention. That first glass, though, can't be stirred at all until you dish some ice into the water glass. Fear not, though: you have a spoon and the water is right there. All is well. Besides, you get to giggle while you do it. All is good.

Not present in the photograph was the switfness of the waitstaff. No sooner than I sat was I given water and asked for my choice of drink. Before it arrived, my waitress had introduced herself as Rebecca and also inquired after my drink preference. When the bus-boy showed with the tea, I thought it only sporting to suggest he let Rebecca know the tea had been covered already. (He never told me his name.)

The downside? The tea seems a bit overbrewed, requiring an extra sugar or two to kill the bitterness. This accomplished, it's juuust fine. Drank several of them with relish and was sad to leave the empty glass behind as I took off to my next appointment. I mean, if someone would follow the glass, refilling it and the sugar service, I would feel like a king all day.

GRADE:
A Lemon
A Tea Spoon
B- Ice (rescued from D by presence of an ice water into which to ferry extra ice by using the spoon, which was conveniently there as soon as the ice arrived; the water preceded the tea; disaster easily averted)
A Sugar
A Refills
Conclusion: the whole is better than the sum of the parts. Getting all this right is exactly what we need for an outstanding tea experience. Dalton's has serving tea figured out, and gets full marks.

Now for the main course. The restaurant seemed to be of the $$$ variety (menu can be downloaded here), with most entrées in the $20+ range and a wine list preceding all food for the first pages of the menu handed out at lunch. However, I was there to discuss documents with a potential client and needed something that would not occupy me too thoroughly. In the sandwiches section was something the restaurant called Debris, which turned out to be stewed beef on an open-faced French loaf. I ordered it with a side of grilled vegetables. The carrots in particular were excellent, but the flavor of the veggies was uniformly fine. Seasoning was mild and enjoyable. Debris was outstanding. I ate it with a knife and fork rather than fold it into a po-boy, because I was intermittently handling documents, and it was excellent. The larger parts of the beef were happily forkable and didn't require recourse to a knife; the only reason I needed a knife at all was to slice through the French loaf underneath and to get mouth-sized bites. Debris was $9.95, including one side. Outstanding.

Blues – from things I didn't recognize to near-pop titles from Creedence Clearwater – played in the background and was enjoyable while allowing conversation. Noise level was excellent, booth seat comfort was excellent, table size was ample, and service was swift and attentive. Nobody pressured me off the table when the food was gone, I was refilled until I left, the place was pleasant on the eyes. What more could you ask?

There is a weekend live-music event nearly every Sunday, with 1.5 hour sittings that include bayou blues from ancient fonts of blues who still know how to lay it down. At $30 for adults and free under 12 years, I'll need to see if the kiddos like blues music. Could be educational :-) Since the opera singer no longer runs a steak joint, the music has changed; but the quality of the experience remains high at the corner of Montrose and the Southwest Freeway.

Danton's Gulf Coast Seafood gets a very solid A on mere average. However, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and Danton's is an A+ on overall. Go eat there: I'm told by a local – living two blocks away – that everything else is good, too.

Iced Tea Report: Barnaby's

When the Jaded Consumer was first conceived, it was to discuss the things we're offered to consume. Lest I be criticized as a never-happy customer, allow me to take a moment to present a recent lunch at Barnaby's:
The iced tea has been refilled (A-: it was allowed to go empty). It came with a lemon slice in the tea (plus for a lemon, minus that I can't squeeze it into the tea without fishing in the tea first; a B+). It was served with a tea spoon. (A+: this means I can sweeten it with provided sugar, and begin drinking without further need to attract a waiter. Unfortunately, I did have to ask for sugar, since the last diner consumed it all at my table, a trick I in turn pulled on the next customer. They could be better about ensuring tables are restocked between customers. I withhold the "no sugar" grade of D because there was sugar on every table, including the next one, and I didn't even have to reach for it because the waiter swiftly remedied my problem the moment I mentioned it, without one of those oh-so-annoying trips to the back, where they tell a bus-boy to fix it, and he forgets because he's fixing something else and his tip-out share isn't enough for him to care about service. Swift and complete remedies are almost as good as initial perfection.) The iced tea came with enough ice to make it gooood and cold, but not too much to allow stirring of sugar: A+. Overall Tea Report grade: A.

Outside the tea, I can assure you (1) that the chicken salad was a huuge salad and its grilled chicken both generous in supply and unbelievably tender to the point of competing for best-in-town status (in Houston, Land of Food, this says something), (2) that the burgers were too big for my girls to eat (even though sharing a burger), and (3) that you can't visit without ordering the pink-smoked chicken, which is falling-off-the-bone tender and has excellent hardwood flavor and a tasty sauce. You don't go home hungry from Barnaby's.

Houston has several locations, and the decor (winged dog bones, dogs painted on walls painted as cloudy skies, dog houses in the sky) proves Barnaby's founder loved his dearly departed sheepdog. By the time you are finished eating, you will too.

Kite-Flying In Flower Mound

In Flower Mound, Texas this morning, the wind wasn't consistently good enough for our friends' six-rear-old daughter to keep a kite in the air. This is rather different from the situation in Houston, where winds still exceed ninety miles per hour in places.

While the nightmarish visions of twenty-five-foot surge did not materialize in Galveston, the night wasn't without casualties: Brennan's burned to the ground. Brennan's was not only a good place to get steak, but they had an excellent turtle soup and were very diligent about refilling iced tea. I will look forward to their re-opening, which I'm sure will follow its destruction as Spring does Winter.

Some years ago, when I expected better of restaurant waitstaff, I actually used my iced tea as my sole barometer for tip calculation. If the tea long stood empty, if tea-spoons weren't forthcoming after repeated requests, and if sugar stood unreplenished after it was brought to the attention of restaurant staff, I tipped with an indignancy that probably astonished waitstaff who may have thought, for example, that getting me an entree that was still hot should count for something. The problem is that so many restaurant staff were incompetent to keep iced tea filled that my lover grew weary and embarrassed at my tip calculation, thinking it signaled that I was cheap rather than that I had high standards. Mind you, I cheerily tipped twenty percent and more for service that got the tea right, and didn't upset anyone whose meal I was picking up. However, the imbeciles who couldn't keep a glass of tea on my table did wear on me. If I can't short them their tips for fear of retribution by my soft-hearted dining companions, I will take to the Internet to expose the sorry state of iced tea service in the South.

So, I hereby launch the Iced Tea Report tag. Where you see this tag, you will be able to tell which restaurants really care about your dining experience -- and don't -- by viewing (I will post pictures of the crime scenes lest I be accused of misrepresenting the state of affairs) the evidence presented in posts so labeled.

The sad story here is that Brennan's, which actualy did a workmanlike job with iced tea, is now out of commission. Brennan's, you will be missed. When Brennan's re-opens, I'll make sure to bring you evidence of the extent to which Brennan's has been able to keep competent waitstaff despite the fire-necessitated closure.

And I'll let you know whether the steak has a smoky flavor.

:-)