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| - Houlihan's is kind of a pseudo fine dining version of a TGI Friday's. The menu is similar to what I would expect from TGI Friday's, but the decor is a lot more trendy right down to the super obnoxious aluminum menus. Although the menu items are fairly pedestrian, they have little twists (chevre on the bruschetta instead of the more expected mozzarella, for example) and there is a big focus on presentation. This makes for wonderful looking food, but the taste doesn't quite hit the mark. Some of the cool looking little food sculptures are also very difficult to eat. My bruschetta came with a little minced olive tower that looked like a cross between a wine cork and something out of the cat box, which was none to appetizing.
Most of the food I had tasted OK, but the fried asparagus stands out as being notably bad. One of my pet peeves is tough asparagus, and the stuff here was enough to make me go postal. It was over breaded, over cooked, and the asparagus was actually chewy. Gross. I couldn't bite through the asparagus, so when I tried to eat it, the asparagus slid out of the breading leaving a pile of greasy panko straws on the plate. The horseradish dipping sauce was good, but lacked zing. At $10 for a dozen bad pieces of asparagus, this should definitely be skipped.
As is usually the case with chains, the menu descriptions made the food sound divine but the taste did not live up to it. It's not bad, mind you, it's just forgettable. This was particularly the case with the "mini desserts," which are actually full sized desserts; one is plenty for two people. Thinking they were much smaller than they turned out to be, we got a $6 trio of pecan pie, banana cream pie, and chocolate cake. All were very cold as if they had just been removed from a long stay in the fridge. All were also very bland and had terrible texture. The pies were both runny, and the chocolate cake was dry and made Hostess cupcakes look gourmet. Like everything else, they looked fabulous, and were also very reasonably priced, but don't let that fool you. They're really not worth it.
So overall, I give Houlihan's a resounding "meh." It's not bad, but I certainly didn't find it to be particularly good. I'm giving three stars because the service was better than I would expect from a newer place so close to campus, and they definitely deserve credit for having such a well trained and capable staff.
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