Lula's - The Restaurant I Just Cannot Seem To Like

Tried Again

We try to be a Monday through Friday local-a-eatin' family (reserving eating out for the weekends). We were pretty set for Friday, having all the local corned beef (Vienna, local at least in production), turnips, red potatoes, parsnips, and cabbage needed for a nice boiled dinner. A combination of things including the snow put a kibosh on our plans. But I still wanted to eat local. Vie was a bit more money than I wanted to spend. Lula's.

It was one of those dinners that during it, neither my wife nor I did much complaining. For one thing, the kidz seemed very happy with their food; for another, since we could not get a read on each other, we did not want to appear to spoil the other's experience. You know. If you both hate it, crap away, but if she likes it, she may feel bad if you start trashing. It was not until the next day that I realized she disliked it about as much as me, and she's not nearly as predisposed to dislike Lula's as me. For her, it was more the service, a bit of the food, me it was mostly the food, some of the service. Bottom line, food on the banal side, service on the inept side.

We shared all: duck liver pate with a bit (and I mean bit) of blackberry preserves and black kale soup for starters; some type of pasta (the menu featured about four pastas whose names I did not recognize) with goat and a "24 hour" lamb shoulder with beans and greens. Let's take the last first. I expected 24 hour cooked lamb shoulder to be one of those, the French have a name for it, eat with a spoon, kinda dishes. Nope, it was hardly soft, rich, unctuous, any of the things the dish implied. Both the goat pasta and the kale soup were excessively bland. The soup, I could taste some cream, some type of acid, but pretty much no kale. The pate was, well excessively smooth, soft. The problem, it worked less as a mousse than it did as a pate.

Service, my wife was mostly bothered by how the staff constantly reached across our table to grab plates. Yeah, that bothered me, but what bothered me more was when I tried to quiz a bit on the actual local. I got a general answer that they used local organic. When I pressed, what was local, what farms, etc. I got a well, there's City Farms, and...and that was about it. No real explanation of what was actually local on the menu. At least if I'm gonna eat non-local food, I want to eat more tasty food.