rev:text
| - This is a chain restaurant with admirable aspirations that fail due to the mass marketing mentality inherent in chain organizations.
ANTI-INFLAMMATORY food.
It's a bold claim and untrue. It's the main reason for the two-star rating. When you walk in, the receptionist greets you with the corporate tag line that the menu is anti-inflammatory. It's also stated on the menu and on the chain's main website. This is just branding and what they'd like you to think they're doing, even though it's untrue.
What is anti-inflammatory? With all of the celiac, crohn's, ibs, sibo, MS, ALS, ADD and "spectrum" disorders on the rise, it's imperative for some to eat this way to function. Generally, an anti-inflammatory diet is grain, dairy, sugar, additive and soy free. But it's also BEAN free. You can call it Atkins, paleo, GAPS, fodmaps, SCD, Whole 30 diet... Many names for essentially the same thing. But you won't get it here.
Where True Food fails: uh most of the above. The menu is filed with grains, dairy, sugar and beans. My salad, the Summer Ingredient Salad, which costs $13, had a full CUP of garbanzo beans and raisins on it. Check the menu. These two ingredients weren't listed on this salad. I happen to be on an actual anti-inflammatory diet and had to pick them out as I ate. Missing was the broccolini, mint and there were maybe 6 pistachios on it and those three things *were* listed on the menu.
The other reason I knocked this down to a 2 was the tap water they serve at the table, which has a taste of mold in it. I have a very sensitive sense of taste and the water in our carafe definitely tasted like mold. I've never been wrong when I've, for example, tasted things like mold, msg, rogue ingredients in food and water. It's sometimes a curse to have such an acute sense of taste, but mostly a blessing. I've always ended up being right. Anyway, True Food Kitchen needs to install reverse osmosis or clean whatever filtration system they do have so they don't serve up any more inflammatory agents like mold in their restaurant than they already are.
|