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| - Every time I come to Phoenix, I like to try a new upscale restaurant , this time Tarbell's looked really appealing, I wasn't overly impressed, but I did get a decent meal.
First of all, the parking situation here is terrible, the strip mall it's in has another restaurant and a bar, so save some time and sanity, opt for the valet.
The hostess was nice, we had reservations but still had to wait a bit for our table. This place was busy and loud, a lot louder than I would have expected. The tables were way too close together. If you were lucky enough to get one of the stand alone tables, it might be ok, but we were sitting along the wall and it was way too cramped.
We had a couple of appetizers, both good. The caprese salad tasted good, but was not remarkable. The calamari was cooked perfectly and came with two really nice dipping sauces.
We ended up getting the appetizers before we even ordered dinner so we had to hang on to our unwieldy menus while trying to eat our appetizers since there was no room to place them on the table.
Dinner was good, not great. 2 in our group got the pepper steak, (Steak au poivre) it was tasty. The creamed spinach was more of a sautéed than creamed. I had the double cut pork chop. This was really good. It came with a couple of pierogi filled with bacon and cabbage. The last person in the group got the special, which was a NY strip roast. She asked for it medium rare, was told it might be closer to medium, to which she replied, "nothing well done". Wouldn't you know it, that piece of meat had no pink what so ever, she sent it back and we shared since we didn't want to wait for an entree to be cooked.
Desert was Creme Brulee and chocolate mousse. The Creme Brulee was huge and the sugar crust was perfect. The chocolate mousse was good, but served in a wine glass, so it was a pain to eat. I'm all for presentation, but functionality needs to be there too.
After seeing this guy on Iron Chef I was expecting a epic meal I would talk about for years to come. I guess I shouldn't have gotten my expectations up.
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