7 December, 2010

So after the raging fail of our last cheese outing, we returned last Tuesday with a great deal of trepidation and readily bottled rage. A regular cheese colleague and I ordered the cheese dip while we waited for Bacon Sandwich to arrive, and we were convinced that it was going to be another terrible week when the waitress didn't seem to understand the concept of cheese dip.

Me: One chili con queso please.
Waitress: Nachos?
Cheese Colleague: No, cheese dip.
Waitress: Do you want nachos with it?
Me: No, the chili con queso dip comes with chips included if that's what you mean.
Waitress: Oh, ok. No nachos?

To Santa Fe's credit, the cheese dip did arrive promptly, and more importantly, IT WASN'T COLD. It wasn't even warm, it was actually a good, hot temperature, perfect for shovelling into our gaping maws.

Here is the usual breakdown:

Consistency: Good consistency, appropriately thick.
Spiciness: Good amount of spice. Very pleased.
Appearance: Two detractors - the continued use of the tiny cheese bowl, and the deluge of salt, which will be explained. There was also an unusually tough skin on the cheese this week, as illustrated in pictures.
Temperature: Blissfully hot.
Flavour: Cheesily wonderful.
Chips: Upsettingly hit and miss. Some were great, some were stale.
Chip-to-dip-balance: Sucked. The thickness of the dip and the teeny tiny cheese bowl meant that even one conservative swipe of cheese reduced the amount of dip by 15%.

Cheese skin.

More cheese skin.

Now, the interesting feature of this week's outing was the sheer amount of salt on the chips. It was like our cheese dip came with a complimentary heart attack. Pictures will illustrate.





We normally don't blog on the tacos, as this is after all, a cheese blog, but this week warranted a taco mention when this slithered out of one of the tacos.


If anyone can tell us what it is and whether it was ever a living creature, it would be much appreciated.

23/11/2010, The Day The World Ended

You may note that this entry is for a tad late. You can't hurry art.

I've worked out why the dip was so amazing last week: it was just to raise my expectations so they could knock me down and kick me repeatedly in my emotions.

I'll start off by saying that the cheese dip itself was...not the worst I've ever had. The spice level was quite good, and what flavour there was wasn't unflavoursome. However, the dip was lumpy. Thin, and lumpy. I don't even know how they managed to get lumps in there, since they certainly weren't made of cheese.

Here is a picture in which I'm pretty certain you can see the lumps.


But the real destroying factor of the night was the service. The service was so bad, I hesitate to even use the word to describe what we received. Here's a brief list of our interactions with various waitstaff:

• The initial waitress didn't know what chili con queso was, and had to have it pointed out on the menu. She then demonstrated that she didn't know what 'beer' was, and we resorted to more pointing.
• After about 15 minutes, we flagged down another waitress to check on where our cheese was
• After another 15 minutes, we flagged down the second waitress again, who again went to check on the only thing we'd ordered.
• 5 minutes later, the lumps arrive.
• We ordered mains at the same time as another beer. The beer arrived 10 minutes after the mains did.
• While waiting to receive said beer, another waiter tried very determinedly to deliver us cocktails ordered by another table
• When they say 'cheese comes with all orders', they mean 'cheese comes with all orders of cheese, but we wont let you order cheese'.

So, the rundown:
Consistency: Consists of water and lumps
Spiciness: Nicely spicy.
Appearance: Initially attractive, but disappointing after a second look. The food equivalent of a butterface.
Temperature: I don't even know how they made it that cold.
Flavour: Acceptable
Chips: Weird liney chips.
Chip-to-dip-balance: Awful. They used the annoyingly-small bowls again and blew all the money they saved on budget chips.