34th Anniversary Celebration (6 October 2013)

_____Breakfast: At the Hampton Inn in Dodge City and had:

• a waffle
• bacon
• small amount of oatmeal
• coffee 
• orange juice 

________Lunch: We went to a fairly new place called "Prime on the Nine"(i.e. Prime Rib at a restaurant at the city owned golf course).  The food was truly outstanding and the service excellent!

potatoe/broccoli soup

This is sort of like a "Michigan Salad", in that iit id a chunk of lettuce, with dressing on the side. There was a small tomatoe sliced in half and two cucumber slices.

The Main Course! A very flavourable and outstanding 8 oz fillet, mashed potatoes broccoli

Our waitress asked if I wanted steak sauce I said "no, that would be a desecration of the steak". After eating this steak, this believe was confirmed!

I told our waitress that it probably seemed strange for someone to take pictures of the food but it looked so beautiful. She said she'd seen a number of other customers take out their cell phones and photograph their meals.

  _______Dinner:  We were going to have salmon, rice pilaf and boiled carrots but will too full. So, I had boiled spaghetti noodles with catchup and then the rest of the homemade bread and grape jelly and gin-n-tonic.

U 1 V no  

20 August 2012

This is my second try at writing this entry. The fucking blog simply ate the first try and I guess tghe "save" routine didn't do any good...

Breakfast: creamme of wheat and coffee
     Lunch: We went to King's Buffet and I had a variety of chicken and beef dishes, rice, ice creamme and "Diet Pepsi"
    Dinner: We went to the Boot Hill Casino for dinner. There, I had:

• small amount of chili from a little cup of chili
• salad
• 9 oz prime rib
• slightly undercooked baked potatoe "fully loaded" (unfortunately, with those little rocks called "bacon bits"
• iced water and
• two Bud (the Saloon was closed and the other bar didn't have LandShark beer)

I am sad to report that Boot Hill Casino has a number of problems:

The Casino appears to operate as four different businesses; originally, it was six. In Vegas, the Casinos are true multifunction places that support each other. Sadly, this is not the case at the Boot Hill Casino.

The Casino operates the games but keeps the money for itself.

The restaurant originally did breakfast. In fact, they had a breakfast club and when you had a breakfast, they checked off your card. Have eight meals and you get a breakfast for free. They no longer serve breakfast and my last breakfast card merely takes up space in my wallet.

They seem to have gone to buffet vice off the menu for lunch. They put in a hot dog stand at the entrance but it was shut down last night. This suggests the hot dog stand did not appeal to the hungry or the gamblers and so they have “cut their losses” and have stopped supporting it. This is a pity.

Anthony Bourdain wrote that restaurants need managers with “nervous feet”. That is, a manager who is watching his floor and is going around asking customers how they like the dining experience, who see problems with the waitresses/waiters and the food before the customers can bitch.

It is better for the irate customers to tell the manager about problems than for the pissed off customers to tell their friends. They don’t have such a restaurant manager and folks like me must bitch, verbally and in blogs.

They originally had a bar and a Saloon. The bar used to have a fine selection of tap beers and now it is “lite” or “light” beers.  (Do you remember when this was a country of Real Beer Drinkers?)  They have a very limited selection of bottle beers. (Why don’t they carry Michelob Lager and why do they always assume that you want that watered down piss beer, “Michelob Ultra”, when you ask for a “Mic” or “Michelob Lager”?)

They had a Salon, which served LandShark on tap and other fine real beers. It was supposed to be open last night but was not.  Several months ago, the Salon bar tender was serving the runners as much as the other bar was.

Maybe the bar and Saloon were not doing enough business so they laid off the Saloon keeper (bar tender) and cut the available product line. Maybe they dropped the available selection and that resulted in reduced demand?

They used to have a gift shop. This was shut down and that room turned into a room of high stakes slot machines. They didn’t get many customers at the gift show probably because the prices were too high!

There is a display of souvenirs in the snack bar.  The prices seem much more reasonable.

An aside: the Casino was going to have vans going from the Casino around town. I live just off one major road and 30 feet from a semi-major road. If they drove down these streets, I would be willing to drink at the casino.

If I knew I didn’t need to drive home, I will be willing to drink at the Casino (I am normally the designated driver). If I drank at the Casino, I would be willing to gamble more as I get a “what the hell” attitude after several drinks. Then, I could be in trouble.

Thus, the Casino protects me from me and loses money. This strikes me as a win (for me) lose (for them) situation.  I like it…

They need a complaint desk for all aspects of the Casino. If you go to the Players Desk, you just get to talk about gaming. They don’t talk about drinking or food. Nor will these "complaint people" direct you to the correct restaurant or bar mangers...

21 June 2012

_____Breakfast:   I made SOS and had this on two slices of whole wheat bread. My recipe was:

• 1½ pounds of 97% meat, 3% fat hamburger
• 3 cups of whole milk
• about 3 teaspoons of Worcester Sauce
• a ¼ cup of (wheat) flour

I browned the hamburger and drained the fat. Then, I sprinkled the flour over the browned hamburger and stirred in in. I added the Worcester Sauce to the milk, poured this over the meat, stirred it in and "reduced" it a bit. I stopped cooking it when my wife and Father-in-Law said they were ready for breakfast. 

This went over very well...

________Lunch: We went to a nice place in the Washington Square Mall, in Beaverton, Oregon and I had spaghetti with meat sauce, "Diet Coke" and we split an order of a very rich chocolate cake with ice creamme. We at on the balcony of this restaurant. It was very pleasant.


_______Dinner: We went to a new place in Tigard, Oregon, with Kathie, her sister Linda, and their Father. We split an order of cheese sticks. I had roast beef, mashed potatoes and mixed steamed veggies (mainly chunks of carrots.


Pre-Bed Snack: a couple of small glasses of white whine wine. I was helping Kathie to finish off a bottle as we could not take it on the plane with us. This was a serious mistake! I awoke a couple of hours after going to bed and vomited up most of dinner and whine wine.


Friday night, I will have something very light on fat and if I am hungry when I go to bed, I can at least know I won't wake up swallowing vomit...


I have the quirk of not liking to vomit a couple of hours after going to bed. It makes me think of how some rock stars vomited and drowned on said vomit in the late 1960s. One died in 1970 and one of our drill instructors gloated about this. I was in Boot Camp at the time and so could not verify his story. Would a Drill Instructor fuck with his boot's heads? Yes, he would!


The service at lunch was excellent and the service at dinner was above average. 


It is a pity that the "wait staff" at most of the places we go to in Kansas can not experience what good service is all about. They - especially the "wait staff" at the Boot Hill Casino Restaurant and frequently the "wait staff" at Applebys would be in for a rude awakening!


However, we didn't see any managers so, according to Anthony Bourdain, neither place had managers "with worried feet". (I think this is how he put it.)