The Letter A -- Annie's Panda Garden

Fearlessly, our intrepid eaters ventured to the banks of Interstate 80. Climbing "Porn Hill" as Couger calls it, we find a smattering of No Tell Motels, cheap gas stations and Annie's Panda Garden. I must confess here that I did not actually enter the forbidden garden, deciding instead to remain in the office and wait for Cougar and Tuna to return with the goods.

The Process:

Today there were three of us on the lunch program, yours truly, Cougar, and Tuna. We began the debate at 11:30 a.m. with a heated discussion of whether or not we were really going through with this plan. Once intention was established, Tuna brought out a four year old Vallejo Yellow Page directory. I thought A Slice of Heaven sounded like a nice place and dialed the number. 40 rings later, I gave up. Anyway, Cougar put the kibosh on A Slice of Heaven as an A restaurant, discounting the article as not being a ‘real’ word. Picky. Annie’s it would have to be. Amazingly, we were ready to phone in by noon. A near record.

The Chow:

Annie’s offers a reputedly tasty amuse bouche, their world famous gelatinous soup. As our three spoons stood nearly straight up in the corn starch laden appetizer, I took a quick glance, a sniff and a pass. To paraphrase Gogol, “You can put sugar on a frog, but I won’t put it in my mouth.”



The actual main courses came attractively packed in some form of Styrofoam. And they were heavy. I thought that we should get a kitchen scale so as to include weight as an element of the food reviews. I’d guess that the individual meals weighed in at, easily, a pound and a half to two pounds. Cougar and I opted for the safe Kung Pow Chicken, while Tuna, being a bit more adventurous than the rest, took the Lemon Chicken. Kung Pow Chicken, I used to think, should be a benchmark, against which one could rate a Chinese place. If this most basic of dishes passes muster, the, the reasoning goes, it should be safe to delve deeper into the menu and order with relative abandon. Over the past week, I have had three plates of nearly inedible Kung Pow Chicken leading me to rethink this hypothesis and what I believed to be a fondness for Chinese food in general.







But let me return for just a moment to the meal at hand. Tuna ordered the Lemon Chicken, which, as you can see, is a boneless, skinless breaded and fried chicken breast with a lemony sauce...or is it? Tuna said that the sauce came in a separate container and that he needed to smell it to ascertain exactly what it was. True, it didn't smell all that lemony and it did have the consistency of garlic oil, but in the end it was "tasty" and "surprisingly good". Not exactly a rave, but a whole lot better than eating poison meat or not eating at all.

Suffice it to say, and I'll spare you the nasty details since this should be a family blog, I probably won't be returning to Annie's anytime soon.

The Rating: 2.7 of 5