Text 1068, 141 rader
Skriven 2013-06-07 03:35:00 av MICHAEL LOO (1:123/140)
Ärende: trip 666
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We ended up eating half the meat, which is still impressive,
as it came to round about 14 oz a person. I cooked it rarer
than most people professed they liked it, but it disappeared
anyway. Of what I sliced, about 6 oz of the rarest was left
untouched. I had this plus another pound for lunch next day.
There are only about 6 or 7 lb left, and Linda and JJ are
coming over from Maryland tonight. ... However, Mike and Jill
have invited us to join them at Cloud Nine, the airport
restaurant, for dinner, so we won't contribute to the
demolition this evening.

==

So Bob and Dave wanted to get on the road (Bob flies out of
Boston, and then Dave takes the car to Cape Cod, where he
has a summer job doing the pregame announcements for one of
the college league baseball teams), and Annie made them a
Penn Dutch breakfast - bacon and eggs, scrapple, sticky buns,
Amish white bread and churned butter. All but the scrapple
were from either Tony the butcher or the local farmers' market
- the scrapple was Rapa, which is better seasoned than the
local product. To drink, choice of orange or red grapefruit
juice from Simply: reliable, not of the best or the worst, and
certainly not local. Leftover pie to fill in the interstices.
Everyone went for the apple. I still don't have the heart to
tell Annie that the peach has two fatal flaws - the filling
looking and tasting like white sauce, and unripe fruit.

Anyhow, we dined at Cloud Nine, formerly known as the Skyview,
but would more accurately be described as Tarmacview. The
predecessor had been a kind of utilitarian place, cheap beer
and edible food, sort of your diner with the gruff-friendly
waitress and the chain-smoking multi-tattooed cook out back,
only instead of being in an old rail car or rusting trailer
located upstairs from the US Air office - not at all bad, mind,
but sort of unclassy. Then it was taken over by Franco's, a
somewhat upscale red-sauce Italian place, and the food and
service are said to have improved considerably. I'd been
taken there a few times, as Mike and Jill like it a whole lot.

Mike sent Annie a heads-up, though: running in the newspaper
today there was an ad for Cloud Nine claiming new management,
new chef, new attitude! which exercised them, as they were
fine with the old management, chef, and attitude. I told her
that chances are this ad referred to the new incarnation vs.
the Skyview.

Present: Mike, Jill, and daughter Sarah home for a week from
college; Robbie; Annie and myself.

When we arrived, the old chef was there to greet us, a relief
for Annie; he even pretended to remember me (which he didn't).
The ad, which had run next to an ad for Franco's, had in fact
been meant as a comparison with last year's Skyview.

At the previous incarnation I'd become fond of a couple
dishes - the burger, which they did rare on request, and a
peculiar little casserole that almost anyone else would have
found totally odious, being chicken livers boiled in grease
and served mixed with Uncle Ben's. The new menu is somewhat
more ambitious.

We ordered two orders of garlic bread for the table. For
$3 and change, it had darn well better be special. Each order
turns out to be about 8 or 10 full-size slices of Italian
bread spread with garlic butter (real garlic mince, not from
a jar, or if it was, from a very good jar) and topped with
lots of Mozzarella. Accompaniments: Franco's famous red sauce
(could be anybody's) and sliced peperoncini, not nearly hot
enough. A lot of food, not displeasing.

Fried calamari were pretty good, done with crumbs instead
of the cornstarch that I use. I like mine better. More of
the famous red sauce.

Sarah liked the bacon-wrapped scallops enough that nobody
else had a chance at them.

Various local beers accompanied. I cheaped out and had a
Yuengling porter, which actually cost 50c more than the
normal Yuengling, even though it's the same price at the
beer store. It was malty and pleasing, though, perhaps
worth the 50c.

Sudden aside: US Air just sent me an e-mail about my
first-class upgrade status on my flights. Four flights,
of which the airline is kind enough to tell me, four
times, that the aircraft servicing this route does not
have a first-class cabin. Well, duh.

Mike was intrigued by the name, so he ordered tips and
torts, which turns out to be half a pound of sirloin
tips, medium, on one side of a dish and half a pound of
cheese tortellini on the other. It didn't make any
sense to me, but, hey, it wasn't my supper. Jill's
lasagne were layered with three cheeses but no meat;
an enormous serving that she enjoyed half of. Little
Sara got a big bowl of cavatelli in pesto and hoovered
down the whole thing.

Annie wasn't too hungry so had a crab cake served over
fashionable greens. It didn't look good to me - somewhat
overfried, but what do I know. 

Robbie's choice of chicken cordon bleu announced itself
by aroma: melted overripe Provolonish over fried goods.
When the food actually came, it was two giant really dark
brown chicken cutlets glued together with the aforementioned
cheesy comestible, sided with green beans and mash. He ate
about a third of this and deemed the rest good enough to
doggy bag. I suppose that I could have asked for a taste,
but this wasn't really a tasting type meal, and further
the smell had really put me off.

Jaegerschnitzel has a meaning to me, and tough underbrowned
unpounded pork with flour paste and mushrooms isn't it. The
serving was saved from total inedibility by a tiny splash of
wine; otherwise a failure, with insufficiently crisped meat
drowned in really insipid gray liquid. A big serving though.
The mash and beans was the regular accompaniment, but I
begged off, asking for a side of spaghetti instead: this
was precooked limp pasta with a sauce probably from a drum,
far worse than Franco's famous red, and topped with a large
quantity of shredded I think Provolone again.

I was on the whole underwhelmed and think that though the
fat guy from Franco's is probably a good cook, he's not
keeping an eye on the people actually doing the work. I've
had better here before under this management and better here
before under the old management. Next time I'll have some
broiled stuff that I can send back if it's cooked wrong.

Dessert: various cliche things, which are probably good, as
the chef's sister has a bakery; our table went for a
variety of ice creams (from the Penn State Creamery, where
they still make Peachy Paterno, which Annie got). To keep
them company I had a Lord Chesterfield ale, which was a
bit hoppier than I remembered, almost an IPA.
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