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| - When a friend of ours finally revealed to us that Mac Shack was not a trendy place to have creepy computer networking parties while enjoying overpriced coffee, my wife and I decided that a mac and cheese based restaurant sounded cool. After we discovered that Mac Shack was being brought to us by the genius culinary artists of Nora's, we couldn't wait to try it out. Spoiler alert...this place makes food that Nora was making in an Easy Bake Oven 45 years ago, and I recommend that if you want a similar quality of food for over half the price, go up the street to Fazoli's.
So, my first indication that Mac Shack was a terrible experience was the typo on the door sign. If you are going to throw obscene amounts of money into your pursuit of being the next Chipotle, learn how to use apostrophes (i.e. "pasta's).
The menu was put together nicely. I was a little weirded out by the TV on the side showing off-menu items and specials. It felt a little too-cool-for-school to use a TV to show off specials, but maybe I am old school in that way. I like the blackboard and chalk approach way more. Anyhow, we settled on some tasty sounding menu items. I ordered the Pepper Jack Mac, my wife got the Red Rigatoni, and we ordered the Baby Mac and Cheese for our son. We also ordered a house side salad, a Caesar side salad, and bread sticks. I kind of freaked out when our bill was 40 dollars. Were we at Nora's or a place called Mac Shack? We should have gone to Nora's.
The food took a while to come out, but it wasn't too bad of a wait. The food came, and it was hot enough to fry an egg on top of our pastas. Literally, steam was racing off the top of my son's "Baby Mac and Cheese." He waited 20 minutes to eat. This is always a pleasant experience with a 3-year-old who loves mac and cheese.
So we ate bread sticks and salad. I think the bread they serve here may come from a bag. They were chewy and the crust wasn't crispy, warm, or buttery. If they are homemade, I am solidifying my theory that they are using easybake ovens in the kitchen.
The house salad was really good. I can say that the best thing we had was the garden salad. Dressing was good and the greens were fresh and interesting. The Caesar was really bad. The dressing tasted like i was shoving anchovy paste in my mouth. It was too much fish. It could work in some restaurants, but really not a good idea for Chipotle gone pasta.
Once the food cooled down, it was very boring. By the end of the meal, we were thinking how we could make all this at home for a quarter of the price. We discovered that this place makes a great meatball (The meatball and house salad are the only reason I would rate this place two stars), but everything else was just mediocre. The serving sizes don't jive with the prices, and they were not exciting presentations. The Pepper Jack Mac comes with "fried jalepenos" but when it came, it had 3 razor thin slices of raw jalepenos. Not very exciting. The red rigatoni was saved by the meatball, but everything else about it was sad. The sauce was bland, the chicken sausage had little flavor and the pasta was overcooked. My son's pasta was a step up from Kraft. Except I would never bring pasta that hot to a kid.
At the end of the meal, my son had a Fruit Roll-Up to look forward to. I am just thinking here....and if I were developing a cool, trendy pasta place with innovative and exciting dishes that I was trying to market to foodies....I would probably serve kids meals with Fruit Roll-Ups. This was the perfect end to a perfectly disastrous meal. I don't like giving my kid Fruit Roll-ups, and I have to wonder about a restaurant that does. McDonalds even has fresh fruit these days. But they could have even done a cookie or ice cream. Why on earth would they serve something that you could buy prepackaged at Smiths?
In closing, this place has all of their attention focused on making this a franchise-worthy experiment. But you cannot be the next Chipotle when you have ordinary food. I don't even think they should try to be the next Chipotle, but it is clear that is their main goal with Mac Shack. In the end, I don't even think the first restaurant will succeed if they cannot figure out how to make better food at a more appropriate price. But based on some of the yuppies giving this place 5 stars, maybe I have no idea what good food is.
Next time we are looking for good "pasta's" we will not dine at Mac Shack. Hopefully nobody that reads this review will make the same mistake we did.
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