15th March 2011

So we ordered dip, which arrived in a type 3 bowl, and we discovered the distinguishing feature about this weeks cheese:

It's incredibly thick. Look at that thing, it peaks a full centimetre above the bowl and the surface tension is holding it with ease. I'm pretty sure we could have held the bowl upside down without risking our precious dip.

After staring in shock for  a while, we tasted it...it was delicious, spicy, and the chips were mostly crispier than normal. But the distinguishing factor is the thickness. Let's have a few progress shots.

It took a lot of effort to hack through the skin so we left it alone after that. The cheese dip refused to deform even slightly as we ate it, to the point that I'm not sure you could call it a liquid at all. It might have just been a spicy block of cheese.

And now, to the rundown:

Consistency: Rock solid but slightly soft to the touch.
Spiciness: Deliciously Spicy
Appearance: Type 3 bowls, which it was GROWING OUT OF.
Temperature: Hot.
Flavour: Delectable
Chips: Mostly crisp and recent, they must have just topped up the chip barrel.
Chip-to-dip-balance:Really quite accurate.

In conclusion: I'm starting to worry that Santa Fe might have come to grips with the idea of 'cheese dip', and we'll have a lot less to write about in future.

8th March, 2011

This week saw only three of us dine at Santa Fe. The hard question was whether to get one serving of cheese dip between three or two serves between three.

We went for two serves.



As you can see from the pictures the cheese chef decided to fancy up the chilli powder. Rather than the usual line, this week we were graced with crosses.


Onto the dip. This week it was hot, spicy, and incredibly thick. This would normally be a cause for celebration, but note that this week we were served with a Type 2 bowl, which holds about three spoonfuls of cheese dip. This was a huge disappointment after seeing other tables served with Type 1 bowls.

In direct contrast to last week, this week we had too many chips. The thickness of the dip and the Type 2 bowl resulted in a significant discrepancy in the chip-to-dip ratio.



We didn't have a repeat of last week with chips that were possibly older than the collective age of the table, however, there were a large number of semi-stale chips. This is further proof of our Chip-Barrel Theory.

The breakdown:

Consistency: Thick, like your mum.
Spiciness: Quite spicy.
Appearance: Type 2 bowls, with fancy chilli crosses.
Temperature: Hot.
Flavour: Tasty.
Chips: Similar to a lucky dip where you have a 50/50 chance of getting something good.
Chip-to-dip-balance: Too many chips. WHY CAN'T YOU JUST GET IT RIGHT SANTA FE?

To finish, please observe the tacos we received after the dip. It appears that we are now expected to arrange the filling ourselves, as the taco chef clearly doesn't understand that lettuce and tomato are not meant to be served in separate tacos.

1st March 2011

As you can probably tell, we've been on cheese hiatus for a month. I'm not going to make excuses, but I would like to say IT IS NOT MY FAULT I BLAME THE REST OF THEM COMPLETELY.

It seems that when Santa Fe is deprived of our constructive reviews, their cheesologist starts phoning it in. Our three rounds of Cheese arrived in a type 3 bowl with the usual mismatched array of chips.

The dip itself was Spicy, on the thin side, a good temperature and with a skin so thick I had to break through it with an icepick. The distinguishing feature this week was the chips. They conformed to The Chip-Barrel Theory remarkably well, with some fresh and crunchy and some chewier than week old bacon.

Look at that thing. That's a chip so stale it was impossible to chew. I'm so disgusted by the sight I'd put it behind a cut if anybody actually read this.


Next up came the tacos. Aside from their usual quirk of serving food before the drinks, the tacos deserve special mention today...because they weren't really tacos. There was a tiny spoonful of something possibly meat in the bottom, and then half a lettuce leaf on top of that.

That's not a trick of perspective, my thumb really is bigger than the filling in the taco. I know they're only two dollars, but I can get at least two empty taco shells to the dollar from Coles next door.

I hope their taco chef is crying himself to sleep right now.


Getting back on topic:
Consistency: Slightly thin
Spiciness: Very nice
Appearance: Average, and type two bowl
Temperature: Quite good
Flavour: Decent
Chips: I can't think of an analogy to describe how stale some were. I mean, I eat Biltong and even that isn't in the same class of chewiness as this.
Chip-to-dip-balance: Too few chips due to thin dip.

1 February 2011 - The Return to Awesomeness

There are many words, few pictures and many orgasmic noises to describe our last cheese outing.

Let us begin with the pictures first.



The pictures fail to adequately convey the cheese experience we enjoyed. I would have taken more pictures, but I was too busy shovelling chips laden with cheesy goodness into my mouth. This week saw a return to the old glory days of cheese, a time before we saw the need for a blog to record the week-to-week inconsistencies. The dip was thick, spicy, hot and brimming with perfectly balanced cheese-tastic flavour. A type 1 dish was used, ensuring a wonderful amount of cheese, and the chips had minimal salt. The only smudge on what would have been an otherwise perfect cheese offering were the few stale chips, set aside in the following picture.


However, that did not stop us from consuming every drop of the wondrous dip. As you can see, the chip to dip ratio was also miraculous.


Consistency: Perfect.
Spiciness: Perfect.
Appearance: Perfect.
Temperature: Perfect.
Flavour: Perfect.
Chips: Almost perfect.
Chip-to-dip-balance: Perfect.

I'm both scared and excited about going to Santa Fe this week. It seems impossible for them to serve us amazing dip twice in a row, but a part of me is praying they achieve this feat.

As a side note, the tacos were also amazing. Just FYI.

18th January, 2011

This week we had the experience of eating what was quite possibly the runniest cheese dip in the world. Halfway through the meal there was cheese all over the table, and by the end of the meal it looked like we had been throwing cheese at each other (which we would never do, it's a waste of delicious cheese).

The cheese dip before the mess started:


Note the return to a type 1 bowl, which houses the largest quantity of cheese (and is thus our favourite).


Trying to show how runny the cheese was, and failing.

The combination of the super runny cheese and type 1 bowl meant that we ended up with a huge discrepancy in the cheese to dip ratio. It seemed like not matter how much cheese we tried to pile onto our chips, we couldn't make any significant dents on the amount of cheese.




As you can see from the pictures, both bowls had a significant amount of cheese leftover that no amount of chiplet scraping could finish. So we ordered another serving of chips.


As the pictures show, I got cheese in my water glass, and Bacon Sandwich dripped cheese into a candle.

For the usual breakdown:

Consistency: Very very thin. It was pretty much cheese water.
Spiciness: Noticeable spice, approval from all involved.
Appearance: Neat at the beginning, cheese warzone by the end. Also, a welcome return to bowl 1.
Temperature: Hot.
Flavour: A little cream-cheesy, but spicy enough to create a good balance.
Chips: What is becoming the usual assortment of mixed chips. Also, very little salt this week.
Chip-to-dip-balance: Disastrous. We had enough leftover cheese in the end to drink.

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.