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| - There are few chain restaurants as hit and miss as Pickle Barrel. The food can be either surprisingly passable or abjectly disgusting, with little consistency between visits.
I live in the area, so I've been to this particular Pickle Barrel many, many times. (It's a fast, relatively affordable option.) It was the last trip about a week ago that prompted me to write this review, as I was quite pleasantly impressed by how much I enjoyed my meal.
The restaurant offers a two course dinner for $9.99 before 6:00, so that was exactly what I took advantage of on my most recent trip. I opted to start with the Matzo Ball Soup, a dish I had inexplicably never tried before.
I have to imagine this is an incredibly weak version of this Jewish staple, but I nevertheless liked it well enough to finish my bowl. The broth was a pretty generic chicken noodle soup type of thing, while the matzo itself, which was enormous, was tasty if entirely bland.
My main course was the Spaghetti & Meatballs (zesty tomato meat sauce
and giant home-made meatballs). It'd be easy to expect a tasteless, Ragu-type sauce with chewy meatballs, but I'll admit this dish is actually pretty decent. The zesty sauce and fairly-close-to-al-dente pasta elevate it above what one might expect, to be sure.
(And god bless the daily drink specials!)
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