Glen M.'s Profile

Hobee's looked like the Pizza Hut, the Dominos, the McDonalds of the breakfast world, but people insisted that no, my huevos rancheros craving could be satisfied here.

The 20-minute wait implied some form of better-than-fast-food popularity, but the aural assault of screaming children and just-finished-our-under-15s-girls-soccer-game OMG-ing raised my partner's eyebrows, the same ones that are raised in "I'm afraid of America" terror whenever she sees a Walmart or Hummer H5.

However, that was all washed away and forgotten when the food was served - if you're curious to know it was possible for huevos rancheros to taste like the entire dish had come out of a single can, this is where you can experience such splendor. The same seemed to apply to the 'fresh fruit', which alternated between bland and sour; it was somewhat like eating coins.

A previous reviewer stated that Hobee's is like a higher-end Denny's. I totally agree - Hobee's is a prison shower to Denny's prison shanking.

It would be easy to be impressed by the concept, the decor, the interesting appetizer bread, the excellent service, the 'fancy but not too fancy prices' and the sporadic but inexorable march of meat, but the problem is, it's just not that good; there are a couple of excellent cuts, to be sure, but the average is just that - average. The most common reaction from our table was "meh, that was OK, what's next?" right up until we finished.

As a parallel, the salad bar is large, contains some fancy choices, is presented immaculately, and then lets you down with pizza-hut levels of deliciousness.

This promised 'font of meat' is located less than one hundred yards from my front door, perhaps one day the wafting scents that greet me after I park each day will bring me back for another go.

So it turns out that "long ribs" are not elongated versions of "short ribs", those tiny finger-food snacks you tend to find at poorly designed wedding where the organizers have failed to realize that messy fingerfood is doom for your fancy new clothes.

No, when you order the "our famous long bone ribs", you get a stern warning about not underestimating the size of your order that makes you think "oh my, I'm no-longer not in a place like Kansas" which is then followed by a delivery of a plate containing what looks like two white Cadillac Escalades covered in cow meat. The "flavor over meat eaten graph" was a descending curve from "OMG this is as good as The Salt Lick in Texas" to "I'm bored of eating the same meat" over the first pound or two, at which point it was prematurely cut short by the limits of my belly. I advise that you go with friends and share different types of cow.

While they have no vegetarian mains, they're happy to turn a salad into a fullsize meal, which was great as this allowed my vegetarian dining partner to fashion a poker visor out of rocket leaves so that she could avoid watching the carnage on my side of the tablet.

Review:
"They have cheap Katsu Curry."

Translation:
"This establishment serves one of the best non-seafood-based Japanese dishes out there. As it is a meal that, like most chicken dishes, has a very flat and short quality vs. price graph, the optimal eating arrangement is to get it as cheap as possible. Therefore, I highly recommend that in the event that you're looking for a generously large, quality meal for $10, you should endeavor to transport yourself to this tiny, veritable Japanese restaurant in the middle of business-park nowhere at the earliest possible opportunity."

I'm sitting here at the gate with a pretty young blonde thing draped over me, and instead of using my last dregs of my laptop battery to read more LOLcats, or attending to the needs of my delicious travelling companion, I am instead compelled, COMMANDED, to write about the katsu curry I just ate at Ebisu.

It's airport food, sure - the pork cutlet was obviously freshly reheated, and the plastic serving box was terrifying in its steamy, operating-room-from-independence-day opaqueness, but goddamn holy moly, taking-all-that-into-account, it was delicious - as I sat there eating, time and the world around me dissolved in unison with the spoonfuls of curry-soaked grains of rice on my eager tongue. Later, as my flavorsome journey was punctuated with a satisfied burp, the expletive-laden exclamation of delight flowed thick and strong, like the curry gravy before it.

I loves me some katsu curry; to me it's the burrito, the one-night-stand of Japanese food - it's best enjoyed cheap, quick and reservationless. Ebisu then, is the balmy college nightclub of that particular analogous universe.

I love Malaysian food, and have been looking for a decent Malaysian restaurant in the area for some time now.

I think I'm going to have to keep on looking - Spice Islands has middle-of-the-road food, service, pricing and decor.

So the frames were pretty expensive and the shop weren't a VSP provider, so they cost me even more, but I still bought my glasses here because they didn't lock any of the cabinets, so we could take our time (and we did take a lot of time) to go through the entire store trying on different things without having an assistant following us around opening things and telling us how great we looked.

I pay extra for silver (invisible) service.

Every time I eat here I get Top Gun flashbacks - it's all "VRRRRRRRRRRRMMM!!!! He's going vertical, then so am I! BRZZRZZZRRRM!!!". The burgers here are quite tall, you see - it's like your plate is a ceramic moat around a Leaning Tower of Burger, which is then surrounded by orange invading Saxons (played by a troope of The Counter's delicious Sweet Potato Fries).

The tallness makes it hard to figure out how to actually eat the burger - use of the provided knife and fork would be giving in, but because of the solidly dense bread material, compressing the burger can result in delicious burger bits being squirted into your neighbor's eye. I believe that this could be why the burgers can be ordered sans bun ('burger in a bowl'), but I guess I'll never know.

Note For Homesick Australians: this is the only place I've found that lets you have a fried egg in your burger, all thanks to their checkbox burger customization form.

Imagine you went to a foreign country and saw a 7-11 but it was a giant mansion with overly-slick accent lighting and decor, staffed by people wearing fancy suits and posh attitudes. Imagine then that you went in, were seated after much delay, and served a $50 main course which turned out to be a giant pile of the same crap you'd eaten at the 7-11 back home.

That's what it's like coming to The Cheesecake Factory. To continue the analogy, a pile of hotdogs might not be a bad thing (actually: mmm!), but when they're dressed up in such pretense, the gleeful junk-food anticipation oh-so-easily turns to crushing disappointment.