Pickles

The MMC met for our monthly din­ner, with a shouted over the din meet­ing, at Pick­les Grill & Cafe in Mar­tinez, GA. We had like 20 peo­ple there (18 more than showed up for the last event) and they put us at one long table (which is a strange predilec­tion for this group), so con­ver­sa­tion was pos­si­ble with only the near­est 5 peo­ple. The oth­ers got noth­ing more than a wave.

With a name like Pick­les you knew they had fried pick­les as an appe­tizer, so I tried some.

My first expe­ri­ence with fried pick­les occurred at Razzoo’s and it went a lit­tle like this: pickle chip num­ber one made me won­der who thought up this vile food item, num­ber two didn’t taste half bad and num­bers 3 through 30 were great. Those guys were crin­kle cut dill chips not much big­ger around than a nickle and were a per­fect one bite sized, eas­ily popped into your mouth.

The offer­ings from Pick­les were large dill pick­les french cut style so that they came out about the size of a flat­tened Pringle. When you bit into it there was no way for your bite to cut and sep­a­rate the pickle so you ended up with half the coat­ing and the whole pickle slice in your mouth and half the coat­ing still in your hand. Cut­ting them into smaller pieces fared only mar­gin­ally bet­ter because the coat­ing would fall off in the dip­ping sauce…

The haz­ards of eat­ing with a group of 20 are many and we caught nearly every­one. If they were try­ing to serve all of us at one time, it failed. We got about 3 or 4 dishes served and then it would take about five more min­utes for the next wave. Diner #1 was about done eat­ing when diner #20 got their meal. If they were just try­ing to get the orders out as they were ready, that failed as well, as our pork chops were luke cold and the cou­ple across from us got a rare steak in place of the medium well they requested. Those that requested loaded baked pota­toes (small­est baked spuds I’ve seen served at a restau­rant) only got them semi-loaded. We got the cheese, bacon bits and scal­lions, but no but­ter and sour cream while some­one else got just the opposite.

They at least split the checks for us with­out adding an auto­matic 18% tip, but at least three cou­ples bills were off in one way or another. The menu was var­ied and inter­est­ing and the food did taste good, so I’m bet­ting that if you went as a cou­ple or maybe two cou­ples the din­ing expe­ri­ence would have been a whole lot bet­ter. I know this, if we were to ever go back to Pick­les I won’t be order­ing the fried pickles.