A Chance Encounter Goes Bad

The Boat Yard Bar and Grill

1308 East Main St.
Stamford, CT 06902





Being in a new city for the first time presents the interesting challenge, “where do I find a place to eat that isn’t completely boring and will actually serve food that has flavor?”

Well, try as I might to find a place that fit the bill, Stamford CT just lacks for originality. Searching high and low, I just couldn’t find a place that was different than the run of the mill “trying to be Irish” bar.

If you’re in the mood for American staples, served in a place that thinks the Shamrock and tri-color Irish flag are the only decorations ever invented, go to Stamford CT. I think I saw 13 Irish pubs listed on my GPS.

Miraculously, I happened upon the Boat Yard.  Not exactly a “hole in the wall” but it is hidden from the beaten path, and if I’d been driving faster than the posted speed limit, I probably would have missed what appeared to be a welcome reprieve from faux Irish accents and the ever present notion that the only beer in the world is Guinness.

As the name would suggest, the place has a distinct nautical theme. Sadly the theme does not extend further than the decoration. The only water the restaurant can see is the creek just outside of the dining room windows.

The beer selection in this particular establishment sadly lacks. On tap they had Land Shark and Harpoon. Not the greatest beers to be enjoyed alone, but when paired with fish they are passable. 

Starving as I was from searching for a place where the food wasn’t served with a side of green sprinkles, I ordered the fried fish platter, hoping against hope it would be heaping full of cod and coleslaw.

I was deceived!  Not only did I get a mere three pieces of fish…they were only the size of chicken nuggets! It would seem to me that a place called the Boat Yard would be able to serve at least a whole fish to for lunch. Guess the ocean is running low on cod.

The coleslaw was also a dramatic let down.  Served in a tiny cup, it was more of a relish than slaw. In fact, I asked the waitress if it was relish and she informed me that it was the slaw. 

WOW, I've had vinegary coleslaw before, but it was more potent than any other I've ever had. I didn't even need to use the malt vinegar they provided with the three fish-nuggets. I'm fairly certain the vinegar content of that slaw will be giving me ulcers in the distant future.

Small as the portion of sea life was, it was tasty but heavily over breaded. 

I can't let the Boat Yard suffer too much in this review. The food was very artistically arranged. If I’d been looking for a fish platter to put on an advertisement or in an art museum, this would be the one to choose! If I hadn't known better, and just guessed on the size of the meal, I would have thought it was ordered from the seniors' menu or maybe the kid's menu. It was tiny!

The service was also very slow. Now it was the middle of the day, and there was one other customer in the whole restaurant, so I can’t completely fault the staff. You know how hard it is to make sure the water glasses of two people are always full. 

Glad they didn’t ask me to buy the t-shirt, because I would have to say, “I’d use your shirt to clean my grill.”

Oh well, lesson learned. Next time I'm going to look for a place that's more run down and has more than one car parked out front. 

Rating: Used the t-shirt to clean my grill!

O’Rourke’s Diner Cures Irish Discrimination

O’Rourke’s Diner
728 Main St.
Middletown, CT




Look, I’ll be the first to admit, the Irish aren’t exactly known for creative, delicious cuisine.

At my Catholic Church pot luck, I’m headed straight for the dishes brought by the Italians.

Or the Cubans.

Or the Polish. Or the Hungarians. Or the Germans, Mexicans or Czechs.

Heck, I’ll even eat French food before Irish.

We Irish have a good way with Smithwicks, whiskey and words, but put us in the kitchen and we’re worthless.

Irish need not apply.

Like all our other misfortunes, I’m pretty sure the British are to blame for this one too.

Boiled potatoes anyone?

So I can understand why you might be bit hesitant about chowing down at an “Irish” Diner.

But you’d be wrong to be skeptical about O’Rourke’s Diner in Middletown, Connecticut. The joint is famous the world over for over-the-top delicious food.

This 71 year old institution is so famous and so beloved that when it was gutted by a kitchen fire six years ago, the local community went out and raised over $300,000 to help Brian O’Rourke, the diner’s owner, rebuild.

General Motors and Chrysler destroy themselves by appeasing the UAW bosses and building crappy cars and then demand a multi-billion dollar Bush/Obama taxpayer bailout.

A fire destroys O’Rourke’s and it is the hungry loyal customers who voluntarily help raise their beloved diner from the ashes.

Now THAT’S how it is supposed to work!

Brian O’Rourke repays that loyalty every day in his kitchen churning out a mind-boggling variety of unique creative culinary creations, many with an Irish twist.

The breakfast menu is eight pages. Eight!

Thirty crazy combination omelets. A dozen varieties of eggs Benedict. Half a dozen versions of French toast. I could spend all morning perusing the menu.

And miss my important Suit757 meeting. And get fired.

That would be bad. I needed to narrow the decision-making process before my head exploded.

Normally under these circumstances, I just go with whatever is the most unique, crazy over-the-top dish I can find. Which includes meat. Of course.

But that still doesn’t narrow things down much at O’Rourke’s.

Unfortunately, my waitress wasn’t much help either.

She said she just likes simple breakfasts – like the oatmeal.

Lady, I know the unemployment rate in this Obama bailout economy is high around here, but you really should think about another line of work.

Then I thought about it. How many times in my life will I find myself in an “Irish” diner?

I’ve got to go with one of the Irish breakfast items.

But which one? There were at least half a dozen by my count.

Now, I know what you are thinking.

You’re thinking, “Suit757, you just got done explaining in such eloquent terms that Irish food sucks.”

Well, my dear Suits in Strange Places reader, you are right.

But there is one very important exception.

Irish breakfast.

Ah yes. The most important meal of the day is the only meal you ever want to eat if you find yourself on the Emerald Isle.

Eggs. Tomato. Blood sausage. Brown soda bread. Baked beans. And Irish bacon as thick and succulent as good country ham.

Mmmm. I could eat an Irish breakfast for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Forget Molly Malone’s cockles and mussels, just give me some more of that sturdy Irish bacon!

Now granted, real Irishmen probably don’t eat a full Irish breakfast any more frequently than Southerners like me eat sugar cane syrup-drizzled pecan waffles and sausage gravy-smothered chicken fried steak.

Delicious, but even Suit757’s stout arteries can’t handle that EVERY morning.

So even for a true Irishman, an Irish breakfast is for special occasions.

And I think a visit to O’Rourke’s Irish Diner is just such an occasion.

The Dubliner Omelet I finally settled on was chock full of corned beef hash and melty aged white cheddar cheese.

This is heavenly hash!

Tender and flavorful, the corned beef hash was enveloped in a perfect accompaniment of melted cheese and egg.

The fingerling potato home fries were a wonderful comingling of potato, onion and spice.

But the homemade Irish soda bread topped with a spread of jam may have been the best thing on my plate, hard as that is to admit.

Suit757 isn’t normally a big carb guy. But Brian O’Rourke made me a convert.

First he made a personal appearance boothside to offer some complimentary fresh baked spice muffins.

But the sweet raisin-studded soda bread made me swear off the Atkins Diet for a lifetime. Grilled to a delightful toasty crisp on the outside, yet still moist as your grandmother’s pound cake on the inside, the Irish soda bread was breakfast dessert.

The only mild disappointment was the Irish bacon laid atop my omelet. Not anywhere near as thick, hearty and succulent as the real Irish bacon I’ve enjoyed in the motherland, this more closely resembled a poor man’s version of Canadian bacon.

The prices here are a bit steep too.

But nobody comes to a gourmet Irish diner like O’Rourke’s for a cheap meal. You come for a taste bud extravaganza.

And I’m happy to say, Brian O’Rourke delivers.

Not bad. For an Irishman.

Rating: Seriously Thought About Buying Shirt.

Grinding It Out

Nardelli's Grinder Shoppe
540 Plank Rd.
Waterbury, CT
(four other locations too, but this is the main one with the billboards on the highway)

Hours: 9 AM-9PM, closed most Sundays
Alcohol: None
Food: Grinders

There are a lot of different names for subs, but they all seem to have to do with Italians in the shipping industry.

Hoagies, for example, apparently originated with shipyard workers on Hog Island in Philly.

The term "sub" apparently was named for the kind of ship, though there's argument as to where and why.

Heros (a New York City Italian term) was named that by Italian workers who said you would have to be a hero to finish one, with the "e" omitted to differentiate from the government employees who like to apply the term to themselves.

Then there's "grinder," which was Italian-American slang for a dock worker.

For whatever reason, that's the word that's caught on in Vermont and Western Massachusetts, which are nowhere near any shipyard, along with Rhode Island and parts of Connecticut.

For the WASPy, New York-centric folks from places like Westport and Darien whom I canvassed, "grinder" now only applies to distinctly Italian subs involving a mix of Italian deli meats like salami, prosciutto and mortadella.

They refer to everything else as "subs."

But at least the term hasn't gone the way of "spuckie," an old Bostonian term for the sandwiches that has almost entirely been replaced by sub, now used by 77% of Americans to refer to sandwiches.

So at Nardelli's in Waterbury, the fact that they call everything a "grinder" is a sign that the place has been around a while.

Since 1922, to be exact.

And they routinely get voted "best grinders in Connecticut" by CT magazine.

There's even a framed picture of Chris Berman, though unfortunately, people don't start yelling, "He. . . could. . . go. . . all. . . the. . . way!" when someone is about to finish a full-sized grinder.

The format here, and at delis in New York, is pretty similar: almost everything, from pasta salad to luncheon meats, is behind the glass, and what needs heating gets heated in the microwave, excepting things like meatballs, which are usually kept hot in a pot.

If my rating here were just based on the bread, it would definitely be a high one.

The bread's shaped like a ciabatta, but the crust is just that little bit softer, and it's got real taste to it. Clearly, someone's got some attention to detail here.

I honestly wouldn't mind just eating the bread, which is a lot better than can be said for a lot of sandwich shops.

And I'll admit that, as someone who grew up in New York, I should have known better than to order the chicken cutlet off their menu.

Chicken cutlets at these kind of places aren't bad, but there just isn't an awful lot of flavor to them usually, especially when they're just left out in a display window and zapped when someone orders one -- it's not like it's actually put on a grill or deep-fryer.

But the fact that the sandwich wasn't full of meat was just inexcusable.

I'll grant that filling that piece of bread with meat would have made it absolutely enormous, but Italians are into lots of food, right?

After all, I've been known to be a food hero before, though my mom and sister just read me the riot act about my weight, so maybe it would have been a bad idea.

But anyway, an under-filled sandwich is hardly fitting for a place whose t-shirts say, "ours is bigger, ours is better."

A basic thing about subs, hoagies, heros, grinders, po'boys or whatever else is that there should be a good amount of meat in every bite, and this sandwich failed that basic test.

You could see the cutlet from the edge, but really, with a deli sandwich, you want it to stick out proudly from the bread.

The sandwich I ordered was called the "prosciutto hot pepper chicken," and it was, well, bland.

The prosciutto added basically nothing flavor-wise.

If it had been half as big with the same amount of meat, it would have worked much better.

And I might have had room for one of their cheesecake burritos.

Their other dessert offerings were cannolis, various other items involving cheesecake, and then cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory in addition to their own, which just isn't that impressive for a local place.

Since it was Christmas, they were also selling various Italian Christmas cookies.

All in all, I'd try the place again if I happened to be passing by, and I'd order something like the meatball sub instead, but I can't really recommend the place from what I ate.

I shouldn't have ordered the chicken cutlet, but they let it come out of their kitchen like that.

And they're going into franchising, which is never good for quality.

Rating: Wouldn't Wear the Shirt If They Paid Me.

Paradise Found in Connecticut

Colony Grill
172 Myrtle Ave.
Stamford, CT
Visited October 6, 2010

Beer selection: Standard blue-collar dive bar offerings.

Food: Pizza from heaven.



Pizza, beer and baseball at 11pm on a weeknight.

Unless you have a Suit757-like travel schedule, you will never know how good that phrase can sound.

Like “Play ball.” “You’ve been upgraded.” “Scarlett Johansson is here to see you.”

It just brings a smile to my face.

During the 40 hours previous to my opening the front door of the Colony Grill, I had crossed the entire continent twice, folded my 6’3” body into five coach airplane seats (so much for Platinum Freaking Medallion), traipsed through seven different airports, stood in three rental car lines (so much for “Fast Break”), gotten four hours of sleep and eaten one meal consisting of an In-And-Out burger consumed on my lap while steering a rental car with my knees down I-10 at 75 MPH. I had laid eyes on the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean and then the Atlantic Ocean again.

As if getting four hours of sleep and one meal in two days wasn’t irritating enough, I had just missed every single pitch of my beloved Cincinnati Reds first playoff game in a decade and a half while crammed into a middle seat for six hours. Of course I had no way of knowing at the time, but that may have been just as well since the Reds couldn’t muster a single hit the entire game.

By the time I landed at JFK, I was not a happy traveler. Especially when I finally got the Reds score.

It was 9:30pm; I was tired, hungry and thirsty and had a one hour drive through New York traffic to get to my hotel.

Under normal circumstances, that is a formula for gas station hot dogs and a 40 of Miller Lite on the hotel bed spread.

But that’s one of the silver linings in the dark cloud of being stuck in occupied Yankee territory.

Say what you will about their socialist politics, nasty attitudes, crappy weather and gridlocked traffic, but those Yankees understand the need to eat and drink after most Southerners have long since gone to bed. And that’s something you really appreciate after enduring 16 hours in a metal tube with nothing to eat.

Three other things Yankees understand are baseball, beer and pizza.

Happily, the Colony Grill had all three.

After a quick change out of my suit, I arrived at the Colony Grill at 11pm on Wednesday night to find a bar full of guys watching the Yankees – Twins game, drinking beer and eating some darn good pizza.

If heaven ain’t a lot like the Colony Grill, I’d just assume stay home. (To paraphrase the great Hank, Jr.)

I’m not sure why it’s called the Colony Grill. There is not much grilling going on here, as far as I can tell.

When I asked for a menu, the bartender handed me a crinkled piece of paper. The top one inch listed pizza and toppings. The other seven and a half inches listed alcohol.

The Colony Grill is basically a dive bar that been run by Irishmen since the 1930s.

It’s definitively not one of those manufactured “authentic” Irish bars you find in touristy spots in Chicago or Boston. The Colony Grill doesn’t have an Irish sounding name, Notre Dame pennants on the wall or even Guinness on tap. What it has is actual Irish guys both serving and drinking the beer, as evidenced by the dozens of Irish police and fire fraternity patches decorating the bar.

The other thing the Colony Grill has is really good pizza. It’s a recipe they’ve been using for decades.

Super thin, yet firm, crispy crust. This isn’t that fold-over floppy mess you get down the road in New York.

Colony pizza is also famous for their “hot oil” topping. It’s basically a mixture of olive oil and spice that melts into the entire pizza, adding a touch of zip to the toppings, cheese and crust. And results in a small mountain of grease-stained brown napkins at the completion of eight oil-soaked slices.

Since “hot oil” isn’t the most visually recognizable of toppings, the Colony adds a “stinger” to the center of the pie -- a very hot pepper with seeds and heat fully intact. One bite and you’ll be begging the bar keep for another draft!

My hot oil pizza with fresh-made Italian sausage and onions was one of the top ten pizzas I’ve ever had.

I was especially proud of myself for the astute choice of onions, which just soaked up the zesty flavor of the hot oil and caramelized under the blaze of the Colony Grill oven.

Each and every bite was an oniony, peppery, cheesy, crispy delight.

The only bone I had to pick with my pizza was with the sausage.

Don’t get me wrong – the gourmet Italian sausage made across the street at Deyulio’s Sausage Company was absolutely delicious.

There just wasn’t enough of it.

I’m a meat-in-every bite kind of guy. When I lift a piece of pizza pie to my mouth, I want to see some spicy dead pig to bite down on. Each and every time.

But that’s a minor quibble. One that can easily be fixed by adding Colony’s big pepperoni discs to the other three requisite toppings.

By the time the clock rang midnight, the Irishman behind the bar was closing up, I had run through half a tree worth of napkins and I was ready to get some sleep (before my 6am wake-up call).

Whether I survive the week remains to be seen. But heaven can wait. I’ve already been there.

Rating: Bought the Shirt!

Books and Food, Oh My

Traveler Food and Books
1257 Buckley Hwy (just off Exit 74 on I-84)
Stafford Springs, CT

Hours: 7 AM-9 PM
Alcohol: Four Mass-Market Beers on Tap and ChocoVine
Food: Basic American Food

I like reading when I eat alone.

It's a great way of passing the time on slow work days, and you can get into a surprising number of conversations, depending on what you read.

So for me, the idea of a place that is a restaurant and a book store is an interesting one, especially given how many libraries have no food rules.

While going from the Boston area to New York as a kid, my family stopped several times by the Traveler Food and Books right by the Connecticut/Massachusetts border on I-84.

I was just a kid, and I didn't know any better about the food, but I remembered the place when, as a freshman in college, I drove a young woman I was very much interested in back to Wellesley on my way back to my college.

I was all excited, because I thought she'd love the concept because she was and is really into reading.

Instead, she was full from a meal mid-afternoon, tired and really just wanted to head back to school, and she hadn't told me that she'd been to the place before with her parents, and she didn't think the food was very good, and she only ordered cinnamon toast.

So I had a bad association with the place for a number of years, and hadn't been back until recently, when another bookish friend of mine expressed hunger a few miles before the exit, and I pulled off, warning him that the food's not that great.

Walking in, it was about the same as it ever was.

The books upstairs are free -- you're allowed to take up to three with your meal. There were lots of Reader's Digest collections of book summaries and some other stuff.

Downstairs in their basement, they charge for books. There was some interesting stuff like old editions of National Geographic (though they've taken to boxing them so you can't look at individual covers), but it's not really all that great compared to some other used bookstores I've been to, and in many sections, the books aren't in alphabetical order, so you're just hunting and pecking.

The food, on the other hand, was a good deal better than that young woman thought. Not great, and pricey for what you get, but definitely decent food.

Mr friend ordered a burger with fries for $8.99, while I had a chicken spinach salad for $12.99.

The salad was definitely tasty, but it was, well, basic: just a bed of spinach with dried cranberries, some chicken and a vinaigrette. And garlic bread on the side which was cold by the time I sat down (I was downstairs looking at books while awaiting my order).

If a place is going to charge $12.99 for a salad, and it's not in a major city like New York or Boston, it had better have a little more flare to it. Bigger chicken breasts that are still hot when they come out. More complex preparations. Whatever it is.

There was a sign out front saying they open at seven, so presumably they only recently started serving breakfast, though it's not available all day like in a lot of roadside places.

Outside, they had a patio that was closed in the freezing conditions, but it looks like they try to draw some sort of bar-type crowd, which is kind of weird given the rest of the business and its location in the middle of nowhere on the side of a highway.

Overall, it's an interesting concept for a restaurant, but it wouldn't surprise me if the place recently changed hands, that that while the new owners are OK at making sure the food's tasty, they don't really have much of a vision for what they want the place to be, so they just add little things onto the core concept.

That “this is interesting but irrelevant” tendency spills over into the booze selection. Overall, they just have four beers on tap (Bud, Bud Light, ShockTop and one other), but then there are table tents at each table advertising ChocoVine, which is some mix of Dutch chocolate and wine that they’re selling.

It's not bad, but it's definitely not somewhere I plan on going again unless I'm in another situation with a hungry bibliophile in the car who’s interested in seeing something different. I'd try one of the various diners in Worcester, MA or any of several places in Hartford and Southern Connecticut that I know of before going here again.

There just isn’t enough time in life for overpriced mediocrity, even if it’s off-beat.

Rating: Would Wear the Shirt if It Was Free, But It Was $12.99

Trying Hard To Keep It All Together In Greenwich

Burgers, Shakes & Fries
302 Delavan Ave.
Greenwich, Connecticut
Visited August 3, 2010

Beer selection: None

Food: Duh?

Look, I’m the first to admit, I don’t keep up with pop cultural trends. I mean, I spend prime time trapped in a metal tube 35,000 feet above the planet four or five nights a week. And I wouldn’t know a TiVo from a Tweet.

But I notice things.

You can’t help but catch on to certain roadside trends as you wander from one metropolitan area to the next. If it’s popular in Denver, you can be sure it won’t be long before it’s popping up in Detroit too.

Well, maybe not Detroit.

Nothing good ever comes to Detroit. But you know what I mean.

In the age of 782 cable channels, the internet and, yes, sites like “Suits in Strange Places”, it doesn’t take long for the unique to transition into the ubiquitous.

The gourmet burger joint is a good example.

Good, high quality ground beef. Cooked to medium rare – not the over-cooked dried up Big Mouth burger down the street at your local lawyer-phobic national chain restaurant. High quality buttered buns. Cool-sounding exotic globe-trotting cheeses.

And a kaleidoscope of outlandish, imaginative toppings and condiments.

What’s not to like about that?

From Five Guys to your local mom & pop joint like Burgers, Shakes & Fries, gourmet burgers is the new black.

Like most of these places popping up all over suburbia, BSF has been open just a few years, here in the hoity-toitiest of suburban American enclaves, Greenwich, Connecticut.

It’s the type of place that Wall Street trophy wives can bring their polite, freshly scrubbed kids on their way home from $25,000 per year private school and enjoy a fast-food-toy-free burger indulgence.

First, let me state that the burger and fries at BSF are outstanding. But like the other gourmet burger joints I’ve patronized around the country, it is missing one important ingredient.

Structural Burger Integrity.

Maybe the idiot-proof society we all live in had desensitized me to such concerns.

We all wander through life expecting the government or the CEO or the body-cavity-searching TSA agent to keep us safe. Protect us from our own bad choices.

Well, no. You are on your own. And that’s damn well the way it should be.

I learned this lesson painfully the first time I patronized one of these suburban fancy burger places.

The menu said I could add as many toppings as I wanted.

So I figured, who wouldn’t want a 2/3 lb. medium rare burger piled high with grilled onions, sautéed peppers, ham, bacon, Tillamook cheese, cheddar cheese, Monterey jack cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, special burger relish and a zesty “bistro” sauce?

Sounds a little unwieldy to me, but hey, what the heck, they are the burger masters. They know what they are doing right?

Well, no.

A straw was the most appropriate utensil for that monstrosity.

Lesson learned.

Now, when I stumble into one of these places, I discipline myself to stick to two or three toppings, max -- including cheese.

So it was a tough choice at BSF.

I decided to forego the bacon, lettuce, gorgonzola cheese, mustard, ketchup and fried egg. That was tough.

I settled on simplicity. Grilled onions – no burger is complete without them. Cheddar cheese – the classic. And special sauce – I’m a sucker every time. Oh, and I had to throw a tomato on there too.

But discretion was not the better part of valor at BSF.

All BSF burgers are served on a buttered, grilled Texas toast.

It sounds delicious, and I’m sure it is. But I’ll never know because my grilled onions and special sauce quickly conspired to convert the bread into a sticky wet paste oozing condiment remainders all over the counter and my Hart Schaffner Marx suit.

While what remained of my burger stew tasted good, there is something to be said about that all-important Structural Burger Integrity (SBI).

Some places have SBI mastered.

I’m convinced that alone explains the cult-like popularity of chain burger joint In-N-Out among the hipster and Hollywood set.

An In-N-Out burger is a work of art that would put Renoir to shame.

Every time.

No matter which pimply-faced cheerful teenager in a funny hat constructs it. Consistently delicious construction, form and function. All wrapped up so snugly in that wax paper you have tear the darn thing off piece by piece to get to the burger.

No special sauce is ever dripping on your tie when you go through an In-N-Out drive through, no matter how many O.J.-esque high-speed chases you get into on the 405.

For once, mom and pop could stand to learn something from a national chain – SBI.

No matter how many cool toppings these guys dream up, they’ve got to come up with a way to keep it all together.

So if you come to Burgers, Shakes & Fries, be prepared to spend about $15 on their namesake meal (this is Greenwich after all). And save a few more bucks for your dry cleaning bill.

Rating: Would Wear the Shirt If They Paid Me (And Paid to Dry Clean It)

Twenty-four Inches of Heaven

Doogies
2525 Berlin Turnpike

Newington, CT
Visited July 14, 2010

Beer Selection: None

Food: Someday you’ll tell your grandkids about it.

I’ve known about Doogies for awhile now. After all, my sister, nieces and nephew live in Newington.

But my marathon-running sister has some sort of aversion to junk food (yeah, I know what you are thinking, but we did actually come from the same set of parents, as far as I know).

In my mind, there is only one thing better than a foot-long chili dog.

A TWO-foot-long chili dog!

And that’s why Doogies is such an internationally known culinary destination. Twenty-four inches of perfectly grilled frankfurter smothered in cheese and chili. The stuff dreams are made of.

But it was just a fact. If I was ever going to indulge in the pleasure of Doogies it was going to have to be a day I was driving through Connecticut when my sister was out of town – a day just like today.

Doogies lived up to my high expectations. All these years of waiting, dreaming, anticipating was worth it for two feet of pig, chili, cheese, bun, repeat. Over and over. Until I consumed every last bite. Plus curly fries.

Sometimes gimmicky mammoth food novelties like this fall far short on quality. But Doogies’ famous two foot dog isn’t just big. It’s darn good too.

Perfectly grilled to a crisp snap, smothered in a quarter gallon of chili and cheese on a bun that holds up surprisingly well, considering it contains enough meat to make John Holmes feel inadequate.

That sturdy bun was a godsend for my suit and tie. Nothing runs up your dry cleaning bill quicker than 24 inches of disintegrating chili dog.
In fact, I was so impressed with the structural integrity of this gigantic tube of meat, I actually left Doogies with regret.

Regret that I just consumed a week’s worth of processed meat in one sitting?

Heck, no!

Regret that I didn’t pile on more from the condiments bar which featured chopped onions, ketchup, mustard and two – two! – kinds of relish.

Oh well. Consider it another lesson learned traveling the back roads of America. Eating your way across the country as a Suit in Strange places isn’t for the timid!

Rating: Bought the Shirt