On Being Served A Bad Biscuit and Offensively Bad Bacon

Photo by GeneralMillsCF, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s the thing: I don’t like just flaming a food place for being bad publicly, but a bad biscuit and offensive bacon is an aggression that cannot stand.

I loathe the Yelp!-ing of reviews that social media has brought forth. While some folks honestly do try to evaluate and give out information, the vast majority are just ranting for attention and/or nefarious purposes that have nothing to do with the average person getting the expected service. Plus, while the nameless faceless keyboard malcontents find great personal enjoyment in trashing business concerns, in the real world there are consequences to such things that service workers just trying to get their check get punished for. A viral PR moment in a thin-margin business usually results in folks becoming unemployed, and if you yourself get your jollies off on wrecking working-class lives for your own online joygasm, then shame on you.

Furthermore, there are layers to things. Not all bad food is created equal. There is “this is bad” because an otherwise good recipe was prepared wrong, left on the pass too long, jostled en route to the table, the chef was having a bad day and thinking about the tragic boating accident death of their pet antelope…any of a thousand things can play into that. So, when out and about, a single instance of a bad food service can sometimes be overlooked as everyone has a bad day, moment, shift, and so on. Then there is “this is bad” as in everything was done exactly according to plan, but the plan was bad and the result on the plate was exactly that.

This is a story of the latter. Names and places are withheld, because if there is ever someone deserving of sympathy it is a food service worker on the floor having to make nice with customers over food they didn’t make, didn’t design, but are in the field of fire should “the customer is always right” idiom manifest to walk amongst us and gets out of hand.

One of the current scourges of modern food is the “pile it up” tendency of folks who take “less is more” not as the cautionary tale it is intended to be, but as a personal challenge to their online culinary brand. Bigger, in food, is not always better, and messy is just mess. While we are on the subject, “country” or “rustic” cooking is not synonymous with “messy” no matter what some folks are trying to pitch you. This is not coming from a place of being a food snob, as anyone who follows my own plating can attest to. But outrageous for the sake of outrageous has limited and diminishing returns when it comes to food you have to pay for.

This particular biscuit fell prey to the failure to reel it in even a little bit. As parts, everything listed and presented are among my favorites, on or off a biscuit. Chicken, apple butter, bacon, cheddar cheese, the obligatory biscuit, all fine things in theory. In practice and as a sum of parts, it was a disaster. The apple butter was fine enough. The slice of cheddar was so disproportionally large it’s a wonder Wisconsin didn’t file an injunction citing the Commerce Clause to prevent it. Cheddar and apple is something debated among folks, and it isn’t usually my thing, but when done right it can work well. This was not one of those occasions.

But it was the bacon and the biscuit that were the real villain of the piece.

Let’s start with the so-called “bacon” that was presented.

I knew as soon as it went in my mouth what the problem with the bacon was, and a quick glance at the menu and back in the kitchen confirmed it. Connoisseur of all things pig that I am, there is a huge, HUGE, difference between actually smoked bacon, and bacon that was injected with smoke flavoring. Now again, no food snobbery here; there is a place and proper use for smoke flavoring when you don’t have hours on end or the proper equipment to smoke or knowledge to do so. For that matter, you really want to get all gastronomical with it and impress even the most stuck up of your culinary social follows, you can even make your own “liquid smoke” to flavor things. But there is a certain kind of food service bulk buy “smoked bacon” that looks like a million dollars on the pictures, and when properly prepared looks like pork heaven on the plate. These particular strips of swine candy did indeed bear the tell-tale looks of properly prepared. But the trouble started right along with the mastication. The layered sweet-salty-crispy-fatty didn’t happen, instead a straight punch to the gustatory system of nothing but that artificial smoke flavor commercially injected defiling the memory of a poor pig who deserved better.

Which brings us to the biscuit.

The first thing I saw walking into this particular establishment is something I wish, in retrospect, I had not seen. In the open kitchen was one of the kitchen staff muscling the bowl of a commercial grade stand mixer between the cooking and prep lines. This was installed on its pegs and the dough hook rotated in for the making of biscuit. This means the biscuits, for those of you keeping score at home from Lizemores, are being freshly made in house. The reason I say I wish I hadn’t seen that is because the biscuits were inferior to some of the premade frozen ones readily available both from the food service and in the freezer section of your local grocer.

Now, it was not as bad as the abomination that is now the once-mighty KFC biscuit. But it also was the named item that was on the nomenclature of the eating establishment and not just a side item. Kentucky Fried Biscuit it wasn’t, good biscuit this ain’t. The main ingredient of scratch making biscuits commercially and in large quantities that turn out this bad has to be several pounds of flour, a bunch of shortening, and a prodigious amount of don’t-give-a-damn. These ingredients are then mixed, baked, cut, and sliced in half to bookend the flavor failure of the entire sorry spectacle. Far from the highlight, the mouthfeel and taste of this here biscuit was just like Mamaw would make, if Mamaw was cooking a beige hallway in the basement of a non-descript government building.

And while I’m worked up, your hashbrowns sucked too, unnamed restaurant. Poor folks have been fixing tasty taters for centuries; if you are going for the nuevo-rustic-country vibe at least get your culinary life together and fry your spuds with some self-respect.

The biscuit of offense. Photo by author.

Anywho…

The best part of the meal was that the Coke fountain drink had the proper mix, and the very nice and trying hard floor worker (since you ordered at counter, then went and got it, then piled it into a return place yourself, server doesn’t apply here) who could tell despite my politeness to them that I wasn’t eating it. I did share part of my food just to make sure my diagnosis was accurate, and they confirmed what I tasted. Nor did they care for theirs with similar concerns of proportion, and the varied parts of what could be good but wasn’t. In fact, they deconstructed their particular version of “pile it up” and once rearranged into actual people portions it was quite tasty, other than the biscuit.

It is frustrating when a food establishment clearly puts a lot of effort into the branding and vibe of their place, then fumbles the easy part of making sure the food is as good as the decor. Hanging long, wordy signage about how friendly the place is and how it’s a community and family place plays well in the concept room, but mangling the food negates that. There is a trend in the food and restaurant business lately where too many concepts fail to be faithful in the little things, one of many reasons the business is so hard with so many failures.

I don’t want anyone to fail. I don’t want folks to not have business, make money, pay their employees, get on Food Network, go viral, whatever else they dream up. God bless, go forth and conquer. But somewhere in all that PR tested naming and branding, for the love of God, make sure the food is good. Especially if you are going to offer up something as visceral to the soul of so many folks as a biscuit.

I’ve been blessed to eat amazing food more often than not, from Up Yonder to around the world. I don’t expect every biscuit to be Aunt No-No’s with the hand stamped patterns on top and baking perfection when you eat it. But with great food comes great responsibility, and we cannot, we should not, we must not, tolerate bad biscuits in places with enough financial backing to if not know better, call somebody and figure it out. But what we have here is a failure to properly biscuit. Some folks, you just can’t reach. So, you get what we had this morning, a failure of the 3 Ps: poor planning, poor process, poor execution.

But no names will be used to protect the innocent. Only words to record for posterity to hold them responsible and accountable in abstention and as avatars to others who likewise do wrong to the public just wanting a decent biscuit at a reasonable price. But unfortunately, some biscuits who were never given a fair chance to be great, were harmed in the making of this story.

Now to plan a trip to Tudor’s Biscuit World and make this right…