Destination Dining: ACME Food and Beverage

Dynamite, anyone?

According to www.dictionary.com the word acme is defined as: the highest point or stage; also: one that represents perfection of the thing expressed.  So when you name a restaurant ACME Food and Beverage, you better make sure it is the finest example of its craft, at least in its own category, like Starbuck's is to coffee or George Clooney is to suave.  So as we bounded into ACME for the first time Saturday night, I was expecting something a hundred times better.  I probably would not have been so disappointed if they had named the place LACKLUSTER Food and Beverage.  Or if that is too harsh, perhaps MEH Food and Beverage would suffice.  But ACME made me think of FT33 or Cane Rosso or the mail order house where Wile E. Coyote bought TNT and anvils in his fruitless quest to exterminate the Roadrunner.  Sadly, none of these notions proved prophetic.

The two chirpy hostesses smiled and greeted us in unison and seated us at a nice corner booth, or what I thought was a nice corner booth until my teeth started chattering and my lips fell off in the non-stop assault of Arctic blasts from their evil seven-ton A/C unit positioned directly over our heads.  It was a balmy 72 degrees outside so I had worn a sporty, short-sleeved Polo which proved completely incapable of keeping frostbite at bay.  I tried using our cloth napkins as emergency sleeves but they were so stiffly starched they kept falling off and clattering to the floor.  Despite the frigid conditions, I lived.

Pull-eeze

Starters were troublesome.  D had the Warm Mozzarella with Grilled Toast, which was a big disc of bland fondue swimming in olive oil.  If I were to compliment it I would say it was stretchy.  I had the Tuna Tartare, which looked like a bright pink, mealy meatloaf garnished with micro greens and pears.  It was enough for a family of four if they liked their tuna raw and sweetened with fruit.  I didn't.

Entrees were equivalent to a meal grilled at home when you've had one too many glasses of wine and it's getting dark and you can't see or tell or care what you are doing.  My Berkshire Pork Chop with Sweet Potato Puree was good the first bite, okay the second bite, and dry as Mitt Romney during Happy Hour at Hooters on the third.  The puree was sickeningly sweet and glowed with a weird, alien orange color the exact shade of Ronald McDonald's hair.

D had the burger and he said it was good except we couldn't figure out why they said it came with

You can tune a piano but you can't tuna fish

"redneck" cheddar. There was nothing redneck about that cheese; it knew several foreign languages and loved opera and had been to Paris twice.  The fries were delicious.  (I ate more of them than the desiccated pork chop.)  D had also ordered the Mac N' Cheese (also slapped with that loathsome redneck label) and they were okay except for the unctuous topping of sticky sweet chutney.  I then realized the kitchen had this thing for complicating savory dishes with inexplicable cloying and distracting sugary flourishes.

The braying of the bottle blonde next to us, the frigid, Icelandic conditions and the unremarkable, childishly sweetened food had us outta there faster than Kim Kardashian's greed-induced but perfectly legal wedding which upheld the long-standing, accepted belief that true marriage is between one man and one gold-digging, 15-minutes-of-fame sex tape entrepreneur.  

At ACME, I wish I could have at least scored some of Wily's TNT since the food itself was definitely not dynamite.