Playing Dress Up - Stella's KY Deli

Fancy Fridays at Stella's sounds great on paper. A solid lunch place just outside downtown that emphasizes local/seasonal produce & meats doing a weekly small prix-fixe dinner menu. We arrived for our 6:30 reservation to an empty restaurant. The cozy 24-top has a small-town, slightly gussied-up lunch counter charm. Our menus were vague & most of the entries were subtitled with something like "changes frequently." With a restaurant of that size and a once-a-week menu, it would've been nice to have a printed menu with the exact descriptions of ingredients & preparations. And the day's date. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing.

The choices were 3 or 5 course but my dining companions and I decided that 3 would be enough as the choices were few and none too exciting. Our salads & soups came out really soon, too soon, after our order. Both the Caesar (misspelled on the lunch menu boards) and the apple bleu salads were fair & forgettable, as was the slightly under-seasoned tomato bisque (dare I say I've made better). The Manhattan fish chowder was far better and less fishy than it sounded though not the best choice for a humid summer day. May I suggest a chilled red pepper soup or classic gazpacho?

Our entrees took much longer to come out and in the interim an unpleasant burnt vinegar smell wafted from the kitchen. I'm fearing the worst for the "Cherry Balsamic Pan Sauce" on my pork tenderloin order.

When the entrees do arrive, I'm pleasantly surprised by the reasonable (read small) size of the protein on the plates. My pork and my friends' steak are the size of thick decks of playing cards (the appropriate serving size according to the USDA). From the moment my knife hit the pork, I could tell it was overcooked. The first bite (and several consequent ones) confirmed this disappointing fact. The sauce & bed of veggies (perfectly al dente cubes of potatoes, tender morsels of portabella and nicely sauteed napa cabbage), however, hit the spot. The steaks were tender and cooked as ordered at medium rare (worth noting as not all places hit their mark in the temperature category). I've got no complaints about the accompanying greens and mashed potatoes.

The lone vegetarian entree was a flaccid mess. The homemade papardelle were way overcooked and fell apart on the fork. The tomatoes & snow peas were not the advertised "Tomatoes, Peas, Red Onions, Carrots and Fennel" but would've passed muster if they weren't watery & bland. There was also no hint of the "lemon butter sauce." Though I don't often order it, I've had my share of good pasta primavera (which should be an olive oily, garlicky showcase for fresh vegetables.

While clearing our plates, our server inquired into our barely touched pasta and my half-eaten pork and we politely told him the honest truth and turned down his offer to make something else. "I wish you would've told me sooner." he repeated. I almost never send anything back to the kitchen unless it was just egregiously inedible. Or I'm paying out the nose for it. At $25 a dinner, I wasn't going to make a big deal of it.

We ended on a better note with Stella's solid desserts. Of our 4 pies, the lemon icebox, Mary Porter & "Not Derby" pies were good but the pecan pie (gently warmed w/a side of whipped cream) was my favorite. Particularly the slightly burned patches of pecans along the edge of the crust. Nice.

Another small quibble... the waiter/manager/proprietor couldn't remember if he was refilling a Coke or Diet Coke. It was the ONLY order in the entire restaurant. I'm just saying.

He did however express his contrition by knocking a whole meal off our check, which we didn't ask for and didn't quite expect. But it's touches like this that show the place is willing to fix problems and work to bring the patron back.

All in all, the impression I have (having had a similar meal here last year) is of a casual lunch counter wading into culinary waters slightly too deep for their experience or level of execution. None of the menu items are terribly technical or exotic but some lacked a bit of basic skill (overcooking pork & pasta). Maybe the name of the weekly dinner says it all: Fancy Fridays. Like a little girl trying on her mom's high heels. Cute but a little awkward.

Arirang Garden (lunch buffet)

For starters, I am SO done with buffets. The food is either dry from the heat lamps or soggy from languishing in sauces/juices/oils. The fried foods (though plentiful) have lost their crispiness. And desserts are represented disproportionately. And I eat too much. It's hard to be disciplined in the face of overwhelming choices and free refills.

That said, the only buffet I can't stay away from is Arirang Garden's lunch buffet. Maybe it's that Korean food lends itself to surviving the ill effects of the heat lamps. Maybe it's because there's nothing fried (besides the donuts). Maybe, no scratch that, definitely... It's definitely because of the soup. A simple beef broth swimming with iceberg-sized hunks of daikon. As your bowl quickly fills with the radishes (tender but not mushy), you fish around the bottom of the deep kettle for the kalbi. Beef ribs so tender they fall off the bones. Simmered for hours & spiked with just enough white pepper to give it a buzz, the Kalbi-Tang is so comforting, it top my "last supper" list. When I first got my braces last year had trouble eating pretty much everything, I came here & had a soul-affirming meal of just rice and the soup.

I leave my beefy trance briefly & try to balance out my meal w/ some of my favorite foods in the world: pan chan. The little plates of pickled vegetables that always come with every Korean meal are spread out over the cold buffet, everything from bean sprouts & marinated mushrooms to radishes (spicy & not) & the ubiquitous kim chee. And if you're lucky, a little fish cake.

The hot plate is rounded out with jap chae (savory sauteed clear rice noodles), bolgogi (tender marinated beef), daeji bolgogi (more sweet than spicy pork) and some variation on budae jigae (a slightly spicy "army stew" with hot dogs, fish cake & sticky rice cake). Avoid the stale donuts unless you enjoy punishing your teeth.

I usually get two small servings of everything, (heavy on the pan chan & occasional sushi roll) and as much soup as I can down.

Yes, I do overeat here as well but I never leave feeling weighed down. If you decide to quit all buffets*, let this be your *.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes... or maybe a souffle

After letting this blog languish (if it were a plant, it would've died long ago), I'm trying to get back on the food writing wagon. I'm going to try to review/write up every restaurant I encounter, no exceptions. Your comments & suggestions are always welcome.

These restaurants have been reviewed but probably could all use updating:

Panda Garden
Billy's BBQ
Portofino
Bella Notte
Kobe
Don Pablo's
Malone's
Oasis
Saul Good
Le Deauville
Petra
Mitchell's Fish Market (Newport)
Char No. 4 (Brooklyn)

Here are just a few I'm thinking of reviewing:

Wallace Station
Hollyhill Inn
Fusion Cafe
Belle's Bakery
Arirang Garden
Han Woo Ri
Bellini
Jonathan's
Seki
Masala
Drake's
Smashing Tomato
Stella's
Suggins
Izakaya Yamaguchi
Smashburger