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| - Oh Steel Cactus, where do I start?
When we walked in for an early dinner this place was pretty empty. Even though it was so empty there were a good 15-20 staff members just hanging around. Some were at the bar, five or six were at the hostess stand and still more were standing around outside of the kitchen. I have never seen so many employees in such a small restaurant. When one of the hostess' finally decided that she was going to seat us we asked for a booth. It took three more requests before she actually seated us at a booth though. She tried to sit us on the deck (it was about to storm, really?) and then she tried to sit us at a table and then she tried to sit us at another table. So finally, we got a booth. The table was sticky and greasy and so were the menus.
We ordered the appetizer trio where you can pick three dips to order. We got the guacamole, queso and pineapple salsa. It was lackluster to say the least. When I was a kid my sisters and I would cook for our family once a week. We really young so often times our meals were pretty much inedible but our parents were good sports and ate the terrible food we provided. The queso dip at Steel Cactus reminds me of a particularly disgusting concoction my sister created that consisted of salsa and Kraft cheese slices melted in a bowl to make spicy cheese dip. It was plasticy, tasteless and seemed solid as a rock. the guacamole was tasteless and generally disappointing. It had giant (I mean like a third of an avocado) chunks of avocado in it. The pineapple salsa was interesting. It tasted exactly like pineapple, which would maybe be interesting if they got different chips to go with it. The chips. Let's talk about those for a second. It seemed to me that somebody took normal chips and gave them a salt rub. They were not good unless you are into super salty chips..
Our main courses were OK. I had the San Jose burrito. Our waiter, who genuinely seemed to be a really nice guy and was a good waiter, said that people love the San Jose sauce. Love it! I did not love it. It tasted like they take unripened tomato and mash it up. I'm not a huge tomato person to begin with. Luckily the San Jose sauce was on the side so I was able to just abandon it. The chicken in my burrito was acceptable and even varied to the good side of things. The rice in my burrito was salty, very salty, and I would get a bite every once in a while that had rice that was undercooked. The ride had litter flavor. the menu said it was cilantro rice in the burrito so I thought GREAT! It'll be like Chipotle rice. WRONG! No flavor at all and I'm not even sure I tasted cilantro in any of the dishes I tried. Everything just tasted like salt. Speaking of salty, let's talk about the salt content at this place.
I don't really cook with salt. I don't use a lot of salt. It's just not a flavor that I find appealing. Steel Cactus loves salt. Everything I had there was slathered in it. The chips practically had a shell made of salt. The chicken was salty, the rice was extremely salty. I felt like a rabbit with a salt block. Honestly, I went through a few glasses of water with dinner and it wasn't because the food was spicy (which is normally why I would drink so much water at a Mexican restaurant), it was because I was trying to flush the salt out of my system.
The service was OK. Our waiter was really very nice and he was very attentive but not hovering too closely over us. Random members of the staff would flutter by from time to time because there really weren't enough customers to justify so many staff members being there.
Let's take a minute and talk about the bathroom. It was OK, clean enough but the thing that really pushed me over the greasy tabled edge into hysterical laughter was the sign in the bathroom asking patrons to please hold the lever down until the "toilette" had flushed completely. Really? Toilette? If you need to have a sign up asking people to hold the lever down, you are not a nice enough restaurant to throw extra letters onto the word toilet.
My favorite thing about this whole experience was that they gave us a customer loyalty card. Yep, because I definitely want to come back and have my sodium intake for the year again! I will just say this, I have always considered the Shadyside area to be sort of a college hangout. So if I were still in college and had consumed a lot of alcohol, the Steel Cactus would be the perfect place to go soak up some of the booze in my stomach with salty burritos and plastic queso dip.
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