Product Review: World Market Chipotle Chili Chocolate Bar

This product, a store brand of the furniture/wine/housewares chain World Market, unites two of Miss Vinegar's favorite things. By now her love of chocolate has likely been made apparent in these pages, but the smoky chipotle pepper isn't far behind: suffice to say that if they made a chipotle perfume, Miss Vinegar would wear it.

The chocolate bar doesn't disappoint, either: it's a nice dark chocolate with a good, consistent undertone of spicy heat, the smoky chipotle showing up as an aftertaste. In Miss Vinegar's opinion, it edges out its most well-known competition, the Dagoba Xocolatl bar. That should teach everyone not to disdain store brands.

Overall Product Rating: **** (four out of five stars, mainly due to the smokiness being a mere aftertaste)

We're Back...So Far

After a brief adventure on WordPress (which is very nice also), Miss Vinegar has decided to give in to her need for shiny new blog templates and return to her old haunts. She might even review a restaurant once in a while.

OddSpelling OddSpelling

Since Miss Vinegar does a lot of proofreading in her other life, she was appalled the first time she saw that Cheeburger Cheeburger was coming soon to a venue near her. Indeed, it was several days before she could believe it was really spelled that way. This may help explain why she and PoBoy put off lunch there for a long time.

Holidays, however, should be for getting things done, and in the spirit of trying something new, Miss Vinegar girded her loins with her check card and headed out.

Cheeburger Cheeburger

in Tanglewood Mall, Roanoke, VA

The Food: Cheeburger Cheeburger (...sigh) is one of those places you suspect of wanting to put onions on the ice cream; even their basic chicken sandwich comes with sauteed onions. They do, however, have a nice build-your-own-burger selection, with burgers ranging in sizes from 5.5 ounces to 20 ounces. Miss Vinegar built a bacon-Swiss burger with honey mustard, and PoBoy went Italian with marinara, provolone and garlic. Both were quite good. A word of warning, however: the restaurant does not provide fries with the burgers, and the medium fries basket we ordered was really quite large. They also have a comprehensive soda fountain, offering handmixed sodas as well as shakes and malts.

The Service: Quite good. Our server helped us navigate the menu easily.

The Ambience: Retro fake diner it all its glory: cardboard cutouts of Elvis, lots of pastels and chrome.

Overall: *** (three stars)

In Which Miss Vinegar Takes Leave of Every Sense, With the Possible Exception of Taste

This one was a solo mission on the way to get gifts for Ma Vinegar's birthday: and PoBoy fearing he would have been out of commission had he eaten at*:

Chili's
Stratford Commons near Hanes Mall, Winston-Salem, NC

The Food: Three dishes caught Miss Vinegar's eye at first: the Monterey Chicken, the Margarita Grilled Chicken, and the Boneless Buffalo Chicken salad. However, in her zeal to eat something she wouldn't eat on a normal night out at home, Miss Vinegar, Despiser of Onions, ordered...the Buffalo Chicken Fajita.

She'd always wanted, you see, to try a fajita, and seduced by the sizzle and the knowledge that the onions and peppers would definitely be big enough to avoid, she went for it. And it was good: mildly spicy buffalo chicken, bleu cheese crumbles and bacon. There was also a lot of it, which is why Miss Vinegar cannot confirm whether the brownie mini-dessert actually has a small brownie sitting on top.

The Service: Excellent. Miss Vinegar always overtips when eating alone, feeling obscurely that she has to compensate the server for the fact that there is only one of her, but in this case it was deserved.

The Ambience: Mostly red, which in Miss Vinegar's book is a good thing. The restaurant's windows are oriented to make the most of the view of surrounding trees rather than the shopping center behind it, which is also a good thing. Her only objection was to the restaurant art beside her. It's hard not to wonder about a composition depicting winged buffaloes that also depicts armadillos...

Overall: *** (three stars out of five--Miss Vinegar would personally add another half-point for a painless introduction to fajitas)





*Miss Vinegar hastens to say this does not denote a food quality issue; for whatever reason, Poboy and Chili's simply do not get along at the biochemical level.

Product Review: Fresh Market Kettle Chips

Mmmmm....ish.

They seem to be a primarily East Coast/Mid-Atlantic phenomenon, but if you haven't heard of The Fresh Market, Miss Vinegar suggests a peek at the website or the one near you. Like Miss Vinegar's beloved Trader Joe's in that it's a sort of boutique grocery for people who secretly dream of having a baguette sticking out of their shopping bag, The Fresh Market aims for elegance where TJ's aims for...fantastic store brand items and pirates. And as the nearest Trader Joe's is almost 200 miles farther away, Miss Vinegar regards the Fresh Market as her local.

This week, Miss Vinegar's eye was caught by a sale display of the store's own brand of kettle chips, and she tried both the Sour Cream & Onion and the Smokey Bar-B-Que flavors (the latter pictured above). And as much as she wanted to enjoy them, there's a slightly strange, almost citrusy taste underlying both. A look at the back of the bag convinces her that, once again, Healthy Ingredient Syndrome may be at play: that, as with the first brushful of a Tom's of Maine toothpaste, it may require time to adjust to flavors that all have pronounceable names. Still, there is only so much time Miss Vinegar is willing to spend accustoming her palate to potato chips. A valiant effort on The Fresh Market's part, but not quite perfect.

Overall Product Rating: *** (three out of five stars, one given due to the aforementioned syndrome)

Chain Mourning

Miss Vinegar just saw this news story about the company that owns Bennigan's and Steak & Ale filing for bankruptcy. While she hasn't been to either of these in years (geography having intervened--and no, they weren't the subject of any Winston-Salem visits; this is not a Grim Eater visitation), Miss Vinegar remembers them fondly: Bennigan's as the first place she ever tasted etouffée, and Steak & Ale as the home of her favorite steak, the Nine Pepper Filet.*


*Warning: the website appears to load very slowly. Perhaps they've already had to sell a couple of servers?**

**The computer equipment, not the food-bringing humans.

Eat This, Ph.D.

Today Miss Vinegar found a nifty little device that's supposed to judge the reading level required for a given website:

Who knew barbecue was so complicated?