However, there are a lot of us to feed, and the adventurous 9-to-5er can find something beyond Taco Bell and Chili’s if they’re willing to look. This week I met an in-the-know friend for lunch at a restaurant of her choosing – the brand spanking new Rack and Rye. R & R’s location has cursed many a restaurant since I’ve worked downtown – including Sambuca, a jazz bar/restaurant that is single-handedly responsible for me meeting my husband.
Confession time: I can be an incredibly selfish, competitive person. If another writer for my publication does a review of or feature on a restaurant that I wanted to try, the restaurant immediately obtains notoriety in my mind. Of course this is illogical and I fully realize that this is a character flaw for which I should probably engage the professional help of a therapist. But hey, perseverance over perfection, right? Anyway, another writer wrote the R & R story and selfish me had mixed feelings about going to the restaurant.
I got there and didn’t love the menu. Then the waitress/barkeep tells me they’re out of pork belly. Maybe I’m glad I didn’t review this place, I smugly thought to myself. I ordered the 5-spice roast duck sandwich, mainly because I’ve eaten more Cubanos lately than poor little Elian Gonzalez and decided to try something different.
A few minutes later I did my favorite thing in the world – something I do more than 1,000 times each year but which still gives me butterflies in my stomach as if it was a really good first date – I took the first bite of my meal. It’s really unfair to call what I ate a sandwich; a sandwich is mustard spread on grocery-store wheat bread with slimy turkey slapped in between. Maybe there are pinkish tomatoes and limp lettuce involved, who even knows. But R & R’s “sandwich”, well, it was an experience.
The sauce – a far cry from mayo, mustard or anything else you’d find in a grocery store condiment aisle – was sweet with a bite. The duck, which can really overpower its accompanying ingredients, meshed with the sauce perfectly but yet contrasted sharply with the pear and Swiss cheese (yes – Swiss! It was still that good, even with the only slightly cuter step-sibling of American cheese!) that joined it inside the buttery baguette.
The duck sandwich was fantastic and, to boot, my colleague who reviewed the place didn’t even try it. So ha. One would think that eating great food would be its own reward, but not to vindictive little me.
Lousy amateur review. You said nothing about the place other than to describe your sandwich, which you liked.
ReplyDeleteHey Jake,
ReplyDeleteNot sure why you'd think this was meant to be a review (in fact, I believe it says specifically that a colleague of mine at Metromix already did a review on Rack and Rye), but thanks for your positive comments! People are so nice on the Internet.
Allyson