Daily highlight #94: A truly bad meal - the Grange

I rarely write negative reviews. It's certainly not because I don't encounter less than sublime meals or that I am afraid to do so. I just would rather focus on the good and happy in my life than the forgettable. But when a meal is so careless thrown together as to make me feel angry that I had to hand over the money, I am compelled to try to prevent others from experiencing the same.

Our meal at the Grange, which took over the old place of the Angel in Decatur, happened on a good Tuesday, when J and I wanted a beer to celebrate a small victory. The beer was great, but everything went down hill from there. J's caprese salad had terribly mealy tomato slices that even looked embarrassingly mealy like an overripe watermelon. My hummus was watery and accompanied by stale pita. Then came the major offender. The fish & chips (above) not only smelled and tasted over fried, the much too brown batter held within gray flesh that flaked unattractively in the way of freezer burned old fish. It was so bad, even the starving J couldn't quite stomach much of it.

I don't know what possessed us to order dessert. Maybe J just didn't want a happy night to end on such a bad note even though I never complained a word in an attempt to keep his good mood going. The waitress highly recommended the brownie with ice cream, so we got that. Big mistake, although I really don't know if the other choice would have been any better. Besides the hard crusted brownie, what really made me sad was that even the store bought ice cream was full of ice crystals. Really, the whole meal was just sad.