28 October 2013

Around the world in a single restaurant

I sometimes make fun of the restaurant options here in Juneau.  There's a lot of bad and mediocre restaurants, and a few really, really good ones.  This weekend, we had one good and one bad experience.  The good one was an excellent new place downtown (V's Cellar) that was billed as "Mexican-Korean Fusion".  It sounds odd, but it was great.  It's a tiny little place, tucked into a basement and kind of hard to find, but I would absolutely go again.

The other one was pretty ridiculous, and in hindsight I should have known to stay away.  I'd heard they had 'decent' pizza.  And it was decent...I make better pizza at home, but it was edible and came out hot.  However, it was the menu that made me laugh out loud.  Despite have an Italian name for the restaurant (which will remain nameless, though Juneau peeps can probably figure it out) they apparently could not settle on just one cuisine, nor even a mash-up of two like the Mexican-Korean place.  This spectacular failure of a concept was an Italian-Thai-Mexican-Chinese-Greek-Steakhouse, with a salad bar, thank-you-very-much.  It also had 1970s supper club style dark amber water glasses (awesome!) and decorative Roman columns as a nod to their Italian name.  I feel like this sort of shotgun approach to menu planning is really common in small towns (or small, isolated cities like Juneau).  I saw something similar in Cordova that was a catch-all Asian restaurant (Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Thai), but this place really takes that up a notch by combining in so many dissimilar options.  How can you even keep all those different ingredients on hand and fresh??  Oh wait, you can't.


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