We decided to try something new and went to the B’witched Deli on West Main.
We were welcomed warmly by the fellow manning the checkout area and he was extremely engaging.
I had the Adam Bomb sandwich and Scott had the White Russian sandwich. The quality of the food was excellent, the ingredients were honest and the waffle fries were just perfect.
The restaurant is clean and orderly, the staff are exceptionally nice and the food is very good.
I give B’Witched a 10/10. Good job!
A few days ago Scott and I followed a recommendation and went to Franco’s Pizzeria in Portage Michigan. This place is very tiny, but has a setting and atmosphere that is really close to what I imagine a pizzeria in NYC would look like. The building it’s housed in is exceptionally, remarkably tiny and the parking is unfortunately very limited.
We ordered a large pizza with extra cheese. The cook time was acceptable and the quality was good. Neither one of us was really impressed however and that may have been because what we ordered was very plain. The total came to about $18 which was right down the middle of the road for what we expected. We likely won’t return, but not because of the food. Mostly for the cramped environment and the parking challenge.
I can’t help but compare this pizzeria with our current favorite place, Erbelli’s. There really isn’t any comparison. Erbelli’s does cost a bit more but I got more of a NYC Pizza experience at Erbelli’s than I did at Franco’s. To be fair, I am not recommending against Franco’s Pizzeria, some people prefer their pizza a certain way and it is well-executed pizza, but it’s just not for us.
Sitting back after devouring a large pizza at Bimbos in downtown Kalamazoo and I’m quite impressed for such a small and unassuming pizza joint. The venue is small, with a very charming interior and a very warm and friendly staff, both of them. 🙂 The pizza crust is very thin, almost a cracker consistency. The only ding is that the pizza we ordered came cut in squares. I think a smaller pizza would be cut in slices. It’s the slices that help a crust like this kind absolutely shine. The pizza oven is tuned perfectly, the bottom wasn’t burnt and it wasn’t rubbery, it was a uniform tan and still retained a little structure and didn’t utterly shatter on cutting. I think we’ll be coming back, and probably selecting smaller pizzas hoping that they are cut into pie slices and that the little square cuts are only reserved for the large size pizzas. It is very close to NYC pizza, but the crust is too rigid to match. It is still quite good and a great value for the money. Overall an 8.8/10.
Today for lunch I used a FourSquare check-in special to try Qdoba’s new Street Tacos at 50% off. I’m glad I got the discount. The staff at our local Qdoba wasn’t very clear on the count of the tacos or their composition. The meal itself was acceptable but these aren’t for me and I won’t be ordering them again. The pictures make the meal seem bigger than it actually is and that was a surprise. In every other regard the meal was okay, but at least for me, it wasn’t worth even the 50% off I used. It’s only available for a limited time so at least there is that.
Earlier today we did lunch at State Burger in Portage Michigan. We were already progressing down Westnedge Avenue doing other errands and while trying to figure out where to go to lunch we remembered seeing this place from our earlier stop at Kumo’s Hibachi Restaurant which is just around the corner of the same strip-mall building.
State Burger, which has a facebook page serves burgers, chicken, fish, and competently good Hot Dogs. The arrangement is a pretty standard burger joint and today they had three people manning the store. The order person, the cook, and someone we both pegged as the owner. Everyone was doing their job very well and our food took not-longer-than-we-expected time wise. This place has a really great thing going and we both agreed that their formula makes it damn near impossible to screw up, that food made with fresh real ingredients by people who are doing their best is a sure-fire way to succeed. Even if you botch everything and burn the food, it’s still quite good.
We were both pleased by the food, the service and you certainly can’t beat the price. Scott was so impressed that he thinks he could make it a regular lunch place when he’s free from Barnes & Nobles since it’s well within walking distance, about two hundred yards from his usual stop, the Pizza Hut. We both commented that skipping out on PIzza Hut for this place was probably the best idea when it comes to healthier food. Between the Pizza Hut and State Burger is Taco Bell. We were laughing at the recent misfortune that Taco Bell had been on the business end of, that people were questioning the notion that Taco Bells meat actually has any meat in it. For all that kerfuffle, it’s pretty much clear to us that you can skip both frankenfood destinations and find better food just a few yards away.
Tonight was the start of our 14th year together. We made this special event even more wonderful by having dinner at a local Kalamazoo restaurant called Rustica. This place reminds me most of the small French restaurants in the Marais on the left bank in Paris. Our meal was accompanied by a new bottle of Muscadet that we’ve never enjoyed before, Bay Scallops as an appetizer followed by a Pan-Roasted Chicken quarter for me and some Parpardelle pasta for Scott.
The best part of Rustica is how it compounds from great beginnings. A wonderful atmosphere, incredibly fresh food, and delightful service. For us it was our long-suffering server Walker. Once we got off the ground with our order we were flying just fine. Everything about our meal was an absolute delight and despite the price, which we both felt was worth what we received, would definitely return for another special occasion. Everyone in Kalamazoo owes it to themselves to try this wonderful place on their next special occasion. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Today for Comixlunch, Scott and I decided to go visit a new-for-us restaurant in Kalamazoo called Erbelli’s. We ran into Max at Fanfare Entertainment (our local comic book shop) and after we bought our comics we took a trip all the way across town to where Erbelli’s is. I already knew they had excellent Pizza due to a surprise lunch thrown for the staff by our local management at work so I expected this to be top-notch.
My expectations were generally met. The pizza that Erbelli’s makes is incredibly good and currently occupies my #1 choice for Pizza anywhere. Their restaurant is unusually organized and I believe it was due to an expansion they made after they “made a better mousetrap”. The “original” shop is very small, quite literally a foyer jammed against a large pizza kitchen. The expansion is a cutaway doorway between the original strip-mall space and its adjacent space. The dominating feature of the adjacent space is the bar, it’s immense! Nothing about Erbelli’s is confusing or difficult to manage. The restaurant has some wear-and-tear issues that come with any place that’s been open as long as they have been and really those didn’t detract from the experience, they were just a part of the ‘atmosphere’ of the place. We went for their lunch buffet, from 11am to 2pm, about $8 per person. Everything about the buffet experience is customer-driven, you get your own food, you tend your own plates, and you tend your own drinks. For what I spent and what I got, it was an absolute steal. Truly exceptional pizza with every part of the experience in my hands, the way I like it.
There was only one problem with Erbelli’s and it’s not really a showstopper, more of a hip-bump adjustment and that is, there isn’t any labeling present on the buffet layout. You don’t know what Pizza is laid out on the buffet and you pretty much have to look-and-see to figure out what is what. It’s something that is exceptionally easy to fix, just need some cardstock, an inkjet printer, and about half-an-hour and anyone could make little disposable tent-cards which would really polish off the entire experience.
When I say Erbelli’s has good pizza, it’s a massive understatement. It’s the best pizza I’ve had in my life and I prefer it more than any other Pizza anywhere (with a normal exception to NYC Pizza, but that’s nearly in a different category altogether!). I can’t recommend them enough, and to that end, here is their contact information and address. If you like pizza, you owe it to yourself to go and enjoy what they have to offer:
6214 Stadium Drive
Kalamazoo, MI
375-0408
-or-
8342 Portage Road
Portage, MI
327-0200
Last night, December 21st, 2010 we got together with our friends and headed to a new restaurant on Water Street in downtown Kalamazoo. This old building was District 211 first, a restaurant that served really odd food at really high prices, then it became Charlie Fosters, which was a smoky Chicago faux-mobster dive and that too failed. In its current incarnation it’s Kalamazoo Beer Exchange.
This new restaurant has a very nice interior and thanks to the statewide smoking ban actually is pleasant to enter. The wait staff really aren’t that interested in welcoming new diners to the restaurant, one may think that they are simply overworked, but we noticed them chatting and ignoring a build-up of new diners at the front door, so take that for what it’s worth. Once we were seated we got our menus, which were fine. This establishment serves bar-food and bistropub food, an odd high-brow/low-brow mix which is cute and innocuous. When you sit down the focus of the bar area is the market-ticker display, a giant flat panel television with the prices of every carried draft beer, and they have about 30 of them available. We asked for a menu of their beer provisions and they didn’t have a menu for their drafts. So you pretty much just had the brand and the name to go by. The gimmick is not readily apparent at first glance and it took a verification question to our waitress to figure out what it all meant. Draft beer prices are adjusted every 15 minutes by the popularity of the beer. So if Bud Light sells a LOT, the price goes up. If beers don’t sell well at all, the price drops. So each 15 minute cycle you could pay $4.25 for a 22-ounce glass of beer, or $3.25 a bit later. The gimmick is cute and does set them apart, but it eventually does lead to irritation as the popularity-feedback-loop means that value is pretty much out the window – a beer isn’t expensive because it’s good beer, a beer is expensive because townies make it one way or another. Case in point, Bud Light was 4.25 and Labatts was 3.25. Ohhh-kay.
As for the food, that was the biggest heartbreak for this place. The burger was top-notch, really well done. The soup was okay, I could have taken or left it either way, but the one thing that blew my mind and ruined the entire experience was the value-added french fries. That’s right, you have to pay an extra dollar to get fries instead of potato chips. So I was forewarned that the fries were overseasoned before and that perhaps they had corrected the problem. Well, obviously not. The dollar-more fries were HORRIBLE. Overseasoned was the weakest description possible for what was slung on a plate. The salt level was beyond anything that I had previously experienced. If I was responsible for perpetrating those french fries and charging money for it, I would be living in a constant fear of being lynched.
That being said, our first experience was a massively bad one. The gimmick is worth a chuckle at first but eventually gets very old very quickly. The food suffers from those unforgivable abominations they call French Fries, and the cost, $32 for 2 people is too high for what you get. We won’t ever return to this restaurant and it’s one of many downtown that we regard as never-agains. It ranks up there with Food Dance in over-expensive pretension trying to masquerade as anything but bottom-of-the-barrel dining. If the initial experience doesn’t drive you off, then either gastroenteritis or kidney failure will.
Today flowed a lot like yesterday did. Woke up, got a continental breakfast and attended sessions. Most of the sessions were useful, one got me considering swapping out my homemade ‘clever SQL use’ for T-SQL Cursors (cue the horrified screams of SQL admins everywhere!) and we were able to enjoy a quick lunch and then have our users group meeting. Mostly we’re happy with the response we’ve gotten from Sage when we initially pitched huge fits back in Chicago, then in Denver, and finally in Atlanta during previous Sage Summit events. They listened to us and a good portion of that I believe was our particular user group writing a ‘Meeting Statement’ and sending that to Sage. By doing that and not leaving it all for the pleasantries of verbal communications they could take the things we wrote to corporate management and definitively show that the users were upset. This time around we decided to do the same document style, a written statement, but instead of being full of piss and vinegar we expressed how happy we were that they responded so well to our statements of displeasure. We also indicated some useful ideas for Sage Summit 2011 which will be held sometime in July in Washington, DC. It’s looking like I may be attending that event, but only time will tell if that’s the case.
Once the convention concluded at 3pm I figured I wasn’t going to be paying any visit to family on my trip to Virginia, which I half-expected, it’s just too much distance and too much trouble and in the end ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’. I instead helped my coworkers go through another round of shopping at the outlet malls, retail therapy doesn’t being to describe it. 🙂 I broke down and after several years of simply pocketing my ID and plastic I broke down and bought a front-pocket wallet. I didn’t even know really that they made such a thing and when I found them in a Totes outlet, even the proprietor didn’t even know they made them like that. They were in a discount rack, originally $15, marked to $9. What the hell, I figure since I saved scads of money on food and supplies last week and this week that I can certainly afford a few splurgy purchases.
Tomorrow is going to be a madhouse. Our flight leaves Richmond at 9:40am, so we have to be there by 8:40, and the people at Kingsmill said that the hour drive to get to Richmond is pretty spot on because as they said “All the Military people are travelling south in the morning, so you won’t run into traffic coming north.” So… we are planning on getting on the road by 7:30am. I’m all packed up and ready to go, all I have to do is shower and load the few toiletries into my bag and I’m ready to go. Once we get back to Kalamazoo we have to rush to the office so we can all fill out our reimbursement forms so we can be reimbursed in a timely fashion. I think right after that I’m going home, as there really isn’t any point in starting work half-way through the day.
Dinner was good tonight, we went to the Whaling Company restaurant in Williamsburg. We got a far better dinner for more competitive prices than the last place that I dinged so bad for having crappy selection and outrageous prices. Now I am sitting back, helping my one coworker polish off the beer she bought so she wouldn’t leave any behind. This is a difficult task I feel I have no choice but to accept. 😉
Tomorrow, the flight. Tonight? Sleep.
Today wasn’t as ram-tear as yesterday was. Breakfast was a continental at the resort center which was a surprise considering all the stories I’ve heard about Kingsmill, but I chock up the differences to a cost-conscious host like Sage and not because the venue just can’t get their host on.
Most of the day was spent bouncing from one room to another, learning some initially upsetting things and then as time went on realizing the inherent rightness of what I needed to do, essentially upgrade via scorched-earth policy. The best way to go from where we are with our product and where we have to go is to rip out everything, and reinstall from scratch. What was going to be an onerous task now became a sluggardly onerous task, but not insurmountable.
Lunch was quick, another continental, and the rest of the sessions went by in a blur. I caught up on my email, caught up on a huge wad of unread RSS feed material and made some headway clearing out my “favorite twitter” queue.
Dinner was shortly after that. We went to Berret’s Seafood Restaurant and Taphouse Grill on South Boundary Street in Williamsburg. The restaurant was initially quite pleasant however it was designed by the same people who assembled our ballroom office-space in Walwood Hall, it is organized like a rabbit warren, little connecting pathways between staging rooms. It’s not that I found fault with my food, it’s not that I didn’t like the restaurant either, but the menu selections were agonizingly assorted. If you wanted Shrimp you could have that, but you also got Oysters. If you wanted Tilapia, you also got Crab Cakes. The short two-page menu was rife with this sort of thing and I looked it over and frankly couldn’t find anything that I could order from the menu that I wanted to eat. Individual items, of course, but each dish was a mishmash of different seafood types and I’m not one for clams, oysters, or mussels. I ended up selecting a special, Tilapia-in-a-bag and got hosed. The dish was $26 but I got food that was really $8.99, at the most generous. The scallops that came with this dish were quarter size and nominally acceptable, but they weren’t properly washed and so I got a little sand in my diet tonight. If you are going to pump a $26 plate, wash the ingredients. In the end the meal was “very light” and that was a generous estimation from some of my dining compatriots who also had what I had. “This is it?” was what we heard up and down. I didn’t pitch a fit because it was a very high-class establishment and in the end it wasn’t my money on the line. If you are visiting Williamsburg, trust me on skipping this restaurant. I’m sure their other foods are outstanding, but if you are in any way picky about your seafood like I am, you’ll either leave hungry or upset, and poorer for it.
After dinner we decided that the night wasn’t over and some of my peers went out to get beer and wine so we could have a chat about our convention and enjoy each others company. The “party” devolved into a conference group meeting and we talked about obvious things that were on our minds, mostly about the company hosting us, Sage. Almost everything we remarked on was positive and we were all generally pleased with how Sage had compensated for their earlier problems that we chided them on in Denver, Atlanta, and our Users Group meeting in St. Olaf. Some people are apparently driven to see the two co-chairs, me and another lady, attend the Sage Summit 2011 in Washington, DC. I don’t see the reason or the justification for it since I’ve already attended here in Williamsburg, but I may have to go in order to make sure that Sage keeps in line with the wishes from our group. Only time will tell with that one.
Meanwhile, I’m contemplating going to visit family tomorrow afternoon after my last session ends, but I don’t have any method of conveyance from Williamsburg to Virginia Beach as I don’t have access to the rental vehicle that I once thought I might have had. The visit to VA Beach is still a possibility, but I haven’t the foggiest how I’m going to get there.
There are some oddities that do bear sharing. Kingsmill is a fantastic resort, but their bathrooms have been outfitted with occupancy sensors that were mounted about head-level, so when you make the slightest move, the toilet flushes and you get progressively more and more spritzed. I discovered that I could fix this … annoying problem by wrapping the occupancy sensor in toilet paper until I was good and ready for it to figure out that it was time to flush. I also noticed that in high traffic areas Kingsmill spares no expense and lays out cloth napkins to dry your hands after using the lavatory. In lesser used areas? Just paper towels. It’s not a problem, but it is kind of funny to see cleverness all the way down to how patrons dry their hands. The only other irking thing has nothing to do with the resort itself, but the obvious and annoying lack of any cellular signal whatsoever. I suppose if you are visiting for the spa, or the golf, or the grounds you don’t care so much about cellular technology. For me it would be a problem, if it weren’t for free Wifi and Google Voice.
Tomorrow is another day, up at 7ish, some more conference sessions and then? We’ll have to see…