Honorable Mention: Tacos Hass

This Chipotle wannabe is located right on Sawmill Road in Columbus. Getting there is a bit of a hassle with road construction in the area (at least when we visited), but that can hardly be blamed on the restaurant itself.

Inside the restaurant, you can tell this is not part of a huge chain. While the place appeared to be fairly clean, it also appeared to be fairly run down as well. While we’re not sure how long Taco Hass has been open, by the looks of the tables and chairs, you might guess 100 years. But the important thing is the food, right?

Taco Hass doesn’t get a full report card since there is no table-side service to speak of. Katina ordered the Hass Quesadilla and I opted for the Burrito Hass. Katina ordered her quesadilla with chicken and no beans. Let me digress a little bit here…how can you like Mexican food and not like beans? It’s like non-alcoholic beer…why bother. Katina says it wasn’t the best quesadilla she’s ever had.  It was really messy yet had very little cheese (which is one of the defining qualities of a quesadilla).  But the quesadilla did have plenty of chicken in it.  My burrito was very large with surprising little meat in it.  It actually looked like it came from Chipotle.  Unfortunately, it just didn’t stack up to what you’d get at Chipotle. Katina washed her burrito down with a margarita that we suspect came premixed straight from a bottle, and I washed my burrito down with an ice cold Corona.

If you want to try to imagine what the Taco Hass experience is like without visiting, do this: close your eyes and imagine being in Chipotle, but with a far lower level of customization. If you were to open your eyes, you might be fooled into thinking you were at a Chipotle since the food looks similar. But that illusion would be shattered after your first bite. Plus, your paying about the same price as you would at Chipotle for food that isn’t quite on the same level. If you find yourself waiting for a gap in traffic on Sawmill Road so you can turn into the Taco Hass parking lot, do yourself a favor and pull back out into traffic. Keep going a little ways until you find a Chipotle and stop there (you shouldn’t have to drive too far since there’s one on about every corner these days).

Report Card: Puffy Muffin

Puffy Muffin

http://www.puffymuffin.com

 

Overall GrubGrade B-

The Breakdown:

Atmosphere: Grade B: First things first…do NOT Google the phrase Puffy Muffin without your parental controls turned on…at least not if your kids are in the room. The Puffy Muffin we visited was in Brentwood, TN (right outside of Nashville). We stopped to snag some breakfast prior to starting our return trek to Ohio. Puffy Muffin is a fairly small and quaint, with a lot of room dedicated to display cases filled with baked goods. This gave us the impression that the Muffin is more bakery than restaurant. There were quite a few patrons in the place when we arrived at 10:00 am, but everyone was spaced apart enough that we didn’t feel intruded upon.

High marks: Small and quaint

Low marks: More bakery than restaurant

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Service: Grade B: Our server was named Dana. Her performed adequately, but there was nothing special about the service. Again, we couldn’t help getting the impression that menu was a secondary service and that the bakery was the primary purpose of Puffy Muffin. We didn’t have too much of a wait for our food, and our order was served up accurately. We ordered some cookies to go and had a bit of a problem getting the correct ones, but once we told Dana the mistake she corrected it quickly.

High marks: Quick

Low marks: Minor error in “to go” order, not much emphasis on restaurant compared to bakery

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Food/Spirits: Grade B-: We had coffee to drink (Katina and I have reached the age where morning coffee is less a luxury and more a necessity). Our meal at Puffy Muffin reopened a debate that Katina and I have had since we started dating – Is breakfast a time of day, or a type of food? For Katina, any food is considered breakfast as long as it is the first meal of the day she eats. Anything from left-over seafood to a carton of Chinese take-out, it doesn’t matter. It is considered fair game for breakfast. I, on the other hand, contend that breakfast is a type of food, like scrambled eggs, French Toast, waffles, pancakes, and cereal. If I were to eat a waffle at 5:00pm, I would suggest that I have had breakfast for dinner. The point is that Katina ordered a chicken quesadilla for breakfast, which in turn forced me to order the Roadhouse Burger so that I wouldn’t look weird eating breakfast while the rest of my party was partaking in lunch. I mentioned in the section on service that we didn’t have much wait for our food, and you could tell by the look of Katina’s chicken quesadilla. Most of the quesadillas we’ve had were stuffed with ingredients that were diced up into fairly small bits. We wish our food would have taken an extra 5 minutes to come out to us, that way the cook would have had time to actually chop up the ingredients. Instead, we got a quesadilla stuffed with huge chunks of chicken that was very bland tasting. The Roadhouse Burger was nicely prepared, but there was nothing really special about it. The cookies we ordered to go were pretty good, but even those didn’t blow our socks off.

High marks: Decent cookies, solid Roadhouse Burger

Low marks: Poor execution on the chicken quesadilla

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Value: Grade B-: The food was decent, but nothing spectacular. We dropped $40 for breakfast (after tip) which seems a little steep considering that we weren’t pining for a Puffy Muffin to open in Columbus after we finished eating. Our suggestion is to save Puffy Muffin when you in fact need to get some muffins, and skip the whole restaurant thing with them.

High marks: Decent food (we’ve had much worse)

Low marks: Overpriced – better bakery than restaurant