Today for lunch we went to Hammy Horton's in Shawnee, OK, which is located in the Cindarella Hotel at 623 Kickapoo Spur Street, Shawnee. We've been there about five times in the last six months. The service is always good. The food is usually very good. However, I've heard that lately their food is not quite as good. So, today we decided to check it out. As usual, the service was very good. There were only two waitresses there today, they're the same ones all the time, no name tags, so I couldn't tell you their names. There were four of us. I ordered my usual, the Cranberry Walnut Salad. It is always delicious. It is a salad with mixed greens, Craisins (sweet dried cranberries), candied walnuts, feta cheese, and grilled chicken (that is very good!). I get it with the raspberry viniagrette dressing, yummy! The other three all got the same thing, chicken fried steak, onion strings (wonderful!), and corn or mashed potatoes (which are real). As I was eating my salad I noticed that there were only about 8-10 Craisins on the whole salad. I don't know if they ran out of Craisins, but instead of using Craisins, they used dates!!!! It made the salad taste so odd that I took all of them off. Not a big deal, but I wish they would have just said, "hey, we're out of Craisins, do you mind having it without?" At least give me a choice, don't just cut corners by putting dates on a salad, very strange!! So I told the waitress when she came over that those were dates, and she said "no, those are cranberries." I politely told her that they were indeed dates and not cranberries. She picked them up off the table and said she would go tell the cook and see, because she was sure he must have thought they were cranberries. How can you possibly mistake a date for a cranberry. The dates are 2-3 times the size of the cranberries (Craisins), and they are almost black, rather than red. Needless to say, when she came back to the table she couldn't even look at me, and she never said another word about them. Yep, they were dates, can't pull that trick on me, I know my dried fruits. And if THAT wasn't enough, it also had only about one-third the usual amount of candied walnuts and feta cheese. Dadgummit!
Okay, so in asking the others how their food was, they said that the chicken fried steak had sort of gone down in quality. Just six months ago it was the best chicken fried steak in all of Shawnee. Not anymore. The onion strings as usual were awesome!
So, one of the things that is so frustrating is that many, many restaurants start out so good, but then they lose their consistency and go downhill. A server can make or break a restaurant, that is true; however, no amount of good service can make up for a restaurant's lack of good food consistency.
I'm sorry to say that I doubt we'll be going back to Hammy Horton's, it was good while it lasted.
No comments:
Post a Comment