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| - I have to give this restaurant mixed reviews. It was PACKED when we were there - could barely carry on a conversation. So, people clearly like it. The busy atmosphere didn't take away from the experience at all. The quality of food was very good, especially the pulled pork. However, the flavors were lacking. We shared the memphis pulled pork and the jambalaya. The memphis pulled pork didn't have any flavor on it - literally at all. There were no classic memphis spices. It was just pulled pork. I asked my waiter about it, and he assured me that it was memphis style, so, I left it at that. But clearly, it wasn't right. I don't know if they ran out and just served pulled pork instead?
The pulled pork itself, while a very good quality of meat, really didn't have much flavor to it. I could only taste the faintest smoke on the edges. The flavor never reached the middle, which was quite disappointing. The texas toast clearly had some kind of butter or oil on it, but, you couldn't taste it. It wasn't salted, wasn't sweet - it just sort of glistened. The coleslaw was much too sweet - I took a bite and didn't finish.
The jambalaya was pretty much the same. It looked great, seemed to have good ingredients. But, it just didn't have any flavor. There wasn't any cajun spice I could taste - it didn't even have enough salt. It was just mildly sweet from the tomato sauce. Truly, it wasn't offensive. It just didn't really have anything memorable about it. I get that people in the midwest are afraid of flavor, and it's hard to make spicy dishes that don't scare people away. But, a jambalaya is where the flavor should really be front and center. Especially when it's described in the menu as "spicy".
I think that some improvements could be made by simplifying the menu. It's pretty big. It's gotta be hard for the kitchen to handle so many different orders. Probably pretty expensive, too. By narrowing the menu down and really focusing on bringing the flavors out of key dishes (first and foremost, salt), I think it the offering could be pretty good. But, for now, the quality is there, but the flavor is not.
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