We don't like to go to the Lower East Side.
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| To Be Fair, It's Not So Fond of Us Either |
Our
animosity toward the Lower East Side stems from its propensity for
narrow sidewalks, non-hosed down streets, and an overflow of hipsters. It
is no accident that even though there are two 5 star Best Thing I Ever Ate dishes
on the Lower East Side (the French Onion Soup dumplings and grapefruit margarita), neither of us has returned once to have them again.
In other words, you're welcome, Schiller's Liquor Bar, that we have agreed to grace your establishment with our presence at all.
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| Oh, the Moral Sacrifices We Make for Best Thing I Ever Ate Purposes |
Schiller's is the home of Tyler Florence's, he of widely-variable-San-
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| They're Too Busy "Not Having a Computer," But More on That Later |
We are seated in the
middle of the room without incident, and we get down to ordering. And by "ordering," we mean "drinking." It's nearly 11am already, after all.
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| The Term "It's Not Even Noon Somewhere" Was Born on the Lower East Side. We Better Do It Justice |
"They have a wet ginger martini," Ginger states. "Though maybe I should get something more appropriate for the hour."
"I'm getting an Old Man Martini," Vodka tells her. And thus it is settled: martinis all around.
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| Old Man Martini = Stellar Name, By the Way |
Along
with the martinis, we order a side of French fries and a plate of the
garlic shrimp (and thus make our waitress think that we are decidedly
more hungover than we are). Said waitress asks if we would like bread
to mop up the garlic sauce from the shrimp, and who are we to deny
ourselves any carbs?
Cut to: the bread arrives, and it is pretty much one serving of some questionable-looking loaf.
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| Well, THIS Will Never Do |
"This is really all the bread they could spare?!" Ginger mumbles to
Vodka as we take our first sips of the martinis, which are, in a word,
sour. And not that great. But they contain alcohol, so, you know, down
the hatch.
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| It's Not Even Mid-Morning Somewhere |
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| "Could They Not Have Found a Less Hideous Section of the Peel?!" |
Before
we can drown our frustrations too deeply in second-rate booze, our food
arrives. Well, more specifically, a heaping cone of French fries (good
portion) and a steaming dish of teeny, tiny, minuscule shrimp (bad
portion) arrive.
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| Objects in Picture Are Larger Than They Actually Appeared |
Naturally,
we count said shrimp, just to prove a point. And there are eleven of
them. Do you know how much this garlic shrimp dish costs? $13. By our
calculations, that works out to $1.18 per (minuscule) shrimp.
Does this place think they're Le Bernardin? We all know how well that place lives on in our memory (ahem).
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| Did They Ship This Shrimp In from the Pacific?! |
The shrimp themselves are... garlicky? Slightly. Lemony?
OVERWHELMINGLY. If anything, either someone made a heavy-handed mistake
with the lemon in the kitchen, or this dish would more properly be
called LEMON shrimp.
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| That Yellow You See Is Not Butter. It Is Lemon |
The garlic is playing second-fiddle here in a big
way, and between this and the cocktails, Schiller's certainly seems to
be fond of catering toward customers' sour tastebuds.
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| Have You Ever Heard of Salt? We Like Salt |
While
$13 buys you a few measly shrimp, what it does NOT buy you is any sort
of plate on which to rest these crustaceans before placing them in your
mouth. Same goes for the bread and the French fries -- NO PLATES. We
are inconvenienced by this fact, if not enough to actually do anything
about it (ie ask for plates).
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| We Prefer to Stew In Our Own Displeasure |
The
French fries are tasty, if nondescript, and if we ever came to
Schiller's again (unlikely), we'd plan on ordering a burger, if only to
get more bang for our buck.
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| Also, Because We Like to Eat French Fries |
Our
check arrives ("$46 for this nonsense!"), and Vodka, checking her phone,
discovers that we have never been checked in for our OpenTable
reservation. One our way out, she inquires about this with the host:
"Could you check us in for our reservation on OpenTable? I'll be penalized if you don't."
"We don't have OpenTable."
"But that's how I made the reservation."
"Right, but I can't check you in."
"Then how will they know if I showed up?"
"I tell them if you DIDN'T show up and we get $1 back if you don't."
"But we showed up."
"Right."
"So can you check us in?"
"I don't have a computer."
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| Who's On First, Lower East Side-Style |
Ginger,
who is somehow understanding this guy's rationale more than Vodka, all
but shoves Vodka out the door. But between the puckering cocktails,
lemony shrimp, and irrational reservation policies, Vodka looks like the
undisputed sourpuss of the Lower East Side.
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