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| My Ourback Steakhouse story and the use of pepper by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 04/25/2012, 11:08am PDT | ||||
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| Back when I was working around 1995 I started a practice of getting out on the weekend. I mean, I'd go to work, I'd go home and dial up AOL, maybe watch a tape (I didn't have cable and most of the local TV stations were hard to get over-the-air.), then go to bed and get up for work in the morning. So I'd make sure I did something else on weekends so I'd get out.
One Sunday I decided to take a long drive, from where I lived in Fort Washington, all the way down southern Maryland on Route 301. On the way, in Waldorf, I saw an Outback Steakhouse so I decided I'd stop there and have dinner. I drove on until I crossed the Nice Bridge into Virginia, about 40 miles or so. (That's not a statement of how it looks, Route 301 crosses the Potomac River at the Harry W. Nice Memorial Bridge.) I drove around in the rural area, came upon a couple whose car was stuck by the side of the road, as it turns out their battery was dead, so I had jumper cables and gave them a jump. Having done my good deed for the day, I turned around and drove home, stopping at the Outback and having dinner, which I enjoyed/ It was as of the next Sunday that I became a regular customer of the Outback Steakhouse in Waldorf every Sunday, where I'd have a Porterhouse steak, Bloomin' Onion and possibly a Chocolate Thunder. I'd routinely drop about $30. I work for a living, I make decent money, if I want to treat myself to this I can afford it, so I did. After doing this for about a month, the manager came by to say hello and thanks, he liked to get to know the regular customers. I think I kept this up for the six months or so that I continued to live in Fort Washington. One time my sister was feeling really bad about something, I forget what. She was kind of unhappy so I decided to cheer her up, so I said I wanted to take her out to dinner. I drove us out to the Outback in Waldorf, Maryland since I knew where that one was, even if it was about 20 miles from her place in Virginia. So anyway, we get there, and it's really busy, there are quite a few people waiting, I hadn't bothered to ask for reservations, not thinking of it, and besides, they don't take reservations anyway. So the hostess said to everyone that basically there's about an hour wait for a table. Well, we're there, we'll wait. Funny thing was, it wasn't more than about five minutes after we show up that a table becomes available and the hostess calls us to seat us. I don't think the suddenly fast service had anything to do with the fact I'm a regular customer who's dropping over $100 a month at this restaurant, do you? :) The one thing I would do with my steak is I'd ask them to put the pepper on the side. Outback tends to put too much pepper on the steak for my taste. It was kind of like I'd have to explain I'm ordering a Porterhouse steak, not Pepper steak. (I'm not a big pepper fan myself; my sister is a fanatic about pepper.) It does add to the flavor, but what I want is a piece of meat with pepper on it for flavoring, not a pile of pepper with steak to make it chewy. Fast forward to a couple of years ago, my brother got a $50 gift certificate to go to Outback steakhouse for his birthday, and because I'm in a wheelchair I can't fit in any of my sister's cars because they're too high to reach; I have to take a cab. The round trip from her place to the Outback in Fairfax, Virginia costs as much as the gift certificate, if I had known I'd have arranged to have Metro Access take me there and back, that only costs $3 each way. And I discover that this Outback also puts a lot of pepper on their Porterhouse steak. Fast forward to last year. For Christmas my brother gives me a $25 gift certificate for Outback. As it turns out, there's one just down the street from me at the Mall at Prince George's, across from the Prince George's Plaza metro station in Hyattsville, MD. (I now live in Maryland again, but in a different part of Prince George's County). In fact, the bus that runs in front of my house runs a block away from the place. So a couple days ago I decide to go there and use the $25 gift certificate. I figure that I'll probably end up spending maybe $10 or so out of my own pocket, but it's nice to try something different every once in a while. So I ordered a porterhouse steak and a bloomin' onion. I get part way through the onion and realized that as big as I am my stomach has shrunk, if I eat much of it I won't have room for the steak. And it's been years, I'd forgotten to ask for the steak to have no pepper and put it on the side. Well, in this case it still was a little bit more pepper than I like but I could stand it. The steak was delicious, I took the bloomin' onion home and ate that a day or so later. I was stuffed, I didn't even order the chocolate thunder, the salad, part of the bloomin' onion, Caesar salad, baked potato with butter and sour cream, and a 16 ounce porterhouse steak was enough. Not counting the tip, it cost $37 so I ended up paying $12. I dropped $4 in cash on the table for the tip. Which brings me to another story about tipping I'll give later. So the whole point of my story is they still put too much pepper on the steak. The manager happened to come by to ask how everything was, I told him my story about the hour wait that turned into five minutes, and I mentioned that I felt they put too much pepper on the steak. I also mentioned that - and as I don't eat salads that much I pointed out that it might just be me - the Caesar salad was okay but had a little too much garlic. Not enough to spoil it but a little more than I preferred. I mean, I'm no slouch when it comes to garlic, when I make spaghetti I have garlic salt, garlic powder, fresh garlic and ground garlic, and I'll use all of them. I love plain spaghetti with nothing but butter, garlic, salt (usually from garlic salt rather than salt alone) and cheese. Maybe I'm more sensitive when the garlic is in a salad, I don't know. But it's been years and consistently Outback Steakhouses routinely put a lot more pepper on their steak than I like. |
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My Ourback Steakhouse story and the use of pepper by 04/25/2012, 11:08am PDT  Every single restaurant regular has a name that the staff gives them, let's vote by 04/25/2012, 11:15am PDT More importantly. by 04/25/2012, 12:34pm PDT Nicknames for restaurant customers by 04/26/2012, 10:27am PDT Caltrops, aka The TDARCOS Blog NT by 04/25/2012, 1:20pm PDT Tdarcos, stop posting NT by 04/26/2012, 11:25am PDT As the other guy said, you don't like my posts, don't read them. NT by 04/27/2012, 1:32pm PDT With these insidious "subject only posts" we can't help it! NT by 04/27/2012, 3:35pm PDT |
