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| - Feeling peckish on the day before Easter, Kay and I utilized our holidays from our respective jobs to get some shopping done and to get lunch at a place I'd been neglecting to try, one that I've flew past more times than I know.
High ceilings, olden decor, antiques, and wooden beams caught my eye as I entered this 45 year old establishment, as did the portly gentleman(owner? manager? head cook?) wearing a deep blue t-shirt emblazoned with the visage of Walter Sobchak.
Minutes after we were seated, we saw someone dressed as Walter Sobchak.
As luck would have it, a screening of Joe and Ethan Coen's cinematic tour de force "The Big Lebowski" was taking place with many of our fellow, good-natured diners impersonating the quirky film's various characters. And this dude abided.
Starting us off was a helping of Aracri's "famous" Onion Rings, and they have a right to be famous considering their lightly battered, fried-to-bronze, not-overly-oily properties.
Considering we weren't out of the Lenten forest just yet, I decided to stay on Jesus' good side (And I ain't talkin' about Mr. Quintana. What would The Dude, do, anyway? He'd screw up like me and have lamb and chicken on Good Friday, testin' the Christman as if he'd really care if he walked the Earth today...) and order the Crab Cakes. Broiled expertly, served with tartar sauce, and generously stuffed with jumbo lump, each cake was as moist as a pumpkin pie, and neither possessed much in the way of filler.
The french fries were a bit limp and dark, a tell-tale sign that they were merely blanched once in boiling fat that was in need of being changed.
Also had was something emblematic of Middle America, a salad I hadn't eaten in a few years and never in a restaurant. An Iceberg Wedge Salad complete with bleu cheese dressing (not my favorite, but it was the only choice I was given) and bacon bits. For burps and chuckles I ordered it an was surprised at how much enjoyment I gained from breaking it down, making sure each forkful of fresh lettuce arrived in my mouth coated in the biting, milky dressing and fatty, crunchy, briny bacon, the tragically unheralded and sometimes derided salad succeeding through simplicity and tradition.
Dessert was a pecan ball slathered in whipped topping from a plastic tub and hot fudge that was irradiated in a glass jar (Smuckers be thy name?). It quelled my angry sweet tooth and little more.
Aracri's is one of those venerable suburban restaurants that deserves its longevity and its continued business, thriving on the standards and ignoring that which is trendy and new.
P.S. Wouldja believe I've never seen "The Big Lebowski" in its entirety? I guess I need to get on that. Until Netflix leads me towards enlightenment, this has always been my preferred Coen Brothers piece, standing as tall as John Goodman himself on my list of all-time cherished films...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AIfVoGUs6c
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