11th January, 2011

I have a new theory about the cornchips. They've got a huge barrel in the back.  Whenever it's about half full they pour in a few cow-sized bags of unlabelled cornchips and give it a half-hearted stir. This explains the weird variety, the surprise recurrence of the salt chips, and the always-lurking stale chips.
And today, it explained the sudden plethora of chiplets.

First things first: After the last visit we dropped our order to just two serves of cheesedip, which arrived in a type-three bowl in the usual configuration.

All seemed quite normal until we actually tried to eat the chips, and found that somebody in the kitchen had inadvertently left a layer of cheese-coloured plastic over the bowl. Thankfully, we broke through after repeatedly hammering it with some of the hardier chips.

Notice that the dip has some consistency there - it was a bit thin at the top, but still managed to work up a good drip factor.

The cheese this week was the best I've had for quite a while. It was moderately thick, quite warm, and quite spicy. But most important was the flavour. You could actually taste something other than cheese this time, and what you could taste was vegemite.
Sure, it sounds weird, but it was genuinely tasty. I have no idea how they accomplished it - whether they've got an experimental new chef in or whether a drunk cleaner just dropped his breakfast into the cheesevat -  but it made a positive difference.

This was slightly balanced out by the chip to dip ratio.

 

Look at that. so much wasted cheese, and half a plate full of chiplets. Who came up with that theory? However, the dip was worth fighting for. We grabbed the chiplets and went to work, one tiny scoop of cheese at a time. In the end, we managed to get the bowl into a more reasonable state.

In summary:
Consistency: Thinnish at the top, adequate most of the way through.
Spiciness: Nicely Spicy.
Appearance: It looked pretty good, but that might have been the plastic coating.
Temperature: The upper end of warm, trending towards the lower end of hot.
Flavour: Vegemite. Delicious vegemite. I wish all vegemite tasted like that.
Chips: Chiplets. The whole chips were fine, with a few stale ones mixed in.
Chip-to-dip-balance: Abysmal. Thankfully our resourcefulness shone through and we forced a balance that didn't initially exist.

4th January, 2011

Our first cheese outing for 2011 was marked by a new milestone in our cheese eating journey.

For the first time, we ordered not one, not two, but three chili con quesos.

One

Two

Three!

As you can see, there was a disappointing return to bowl type number two (the smallest and most cry-worthy one). Furthermore, note that this week we had chips that weren't in the process of being suffocated by salt, which was pleasing as it meant we could actually taste the cheese dip.

So how did the cheese dip fare? The breakdown:

Consistency: Very thin. The cheese dip was practically fleeing the chips, that's how thin it was.
Spiciness: Low amount of spice.
Appearance: Cheese dip x 3 = happiness.
Temperature: Orgasmically hot.
Flavour: Became a little cream-cheesey towards the end, but was on the whole quite satisfying.
Chips: The table agreed that the chips this week had a distinct cornflakes taste. One of our cheese colleagues who had a chili con queso to herself also had the displeasure of a high ratio of stale chips. The stale chips were particularly bad this week, mouths were nearly glued shut from how soft they were.
Chip-to-dip-balance: Was pretty damn good. Though there was a return to the smaller dish, the thinner consistency meant that the dip went further.



It is worth noting that the service this week was actually really good. Our order was taken promptly, the food arrived quickly and there were no fuck-ups, unreasonable delays or spaced-out waitstaff. Fingers crossed this trend continues for the year.

This week we also splashed out on churros. I'll let the pictures speak of their deliciousness.

21st December, 2010

The 21st was a surprising day for cheese everywhere. Generally, Santa Fe likes to spring about one unexpected change on us per visit, but today they pretty much declared war.

First off, The beer they served me came in a stylish new way: Please note the lime wedge exactly where your nose is going, but no salt this time.

I guessed they wanted me to smell the lime as I taste the beer, as some kind of multi-sensory cocktail...maybe it works for people with smaller noses, but I just found it hard to breathe.

Now, when the dip arrive, we had SHOCK NUMBER TWO:

 That, my friend, is a Type 3 bowl. I've never seen that bowl before in my life. It's like some crazy variation that sits between bowl types 1 and 2 - holds more than #2, but less than #1. We've just been thrown headfirst into a whole new era of cheesedip.

Not content with this, they broke out a third, more subtle shock.
Look at these chips. They look perfectly normal, don't they?

But then when you lift one up, you find...

BAM. SURPRISE SALT. About one in every eight chips turned out to be pure salt masquerading as corn. I have no idea how they'd have managed this without specifically hiring a guy to oversalt a fraction of the chips, and the saltiness completely overpowered any other flavours.
(Note: I've come up with a new theory since then. a lot of the very-salty chips were stale, so perhaps they were oversalted to try to draw some moisture out of the chip and render it deliciously firm again? Discuss.)


So, I guess I should mention the dip itself.

It wasn't that bad, actually. It was thick, it was warmish, and the chip to dip ratio was perfectly judged. It did, however, fall down a bit in the flavour and spice, which made it a bit too creamcheesy for our liking. Couple that with the overpowering salt, and I was just left with a thick and salty residue in my mouth that brought back so many memories.


The breakdown:
Consistency: Incredibly thick. Impossibly awesomely thick.
Spiciness: I don't really recall any spice.
Appearance: BOWL NUMBER THREE. Presentation was nice aside from that.
Temperature: average.
Flavour: Nonexistent, quite creamcheesy.
Chips: A completely mixed bag again, liney ones, unliney ones, and surprise salt sensations.
Chip-to-dip-balance: Spot on. There's no way they could do it better.