Zuppa

My previous post essentially stated that I downgraded the restaurant almost 5 minutes into the meal owing to the quality of the soup (and confirmed shortly thereafter by the subpar food).
The question of the inverse problem now crops up? What if the soup is good? With a name like Zuppa, one would imagine that this restaurant specializes in the aforementioned item (an appetizer or a full meal if one chooses so).
A couple of visits to this Zuppa have resulted in pretty good soups - The creamy tomato being our favorite. A nice consistency and taste. They do justice to their name. However, oddly, they serve crackers with all their soups, which seems a bit of a cheapening of the entire premise.
What of the food? It turns out that the answer to the posed question is - 'not necessarily so'. We havent actually had any entrees here but we tried a few of their sandwiches and wraps. And they were decent, not great not bad but very deli-ish and very importantly - greasy !! I had to use a copious quantity of napkins for a couple of their sandwiches (notably - the barbeque sandwich with apple bacon bbq sauce). The quantity of the grease made the otherwise decent sandwich a bit disconcerting on the old gastric system.

The one downside to zuppa is the really slow service. On one particularly poor occasion (which was a holiday of some sort but the restaurant was pretty full), there was one waitress for around ten tables !! We felt bad for the poor girl. It wasnt her fault but the restaurant management could perhaps do a better job making assignments. Other visits havent been positive either with the clear problem being that the restaurant is quite severly undermanned. Is finding waitresses difficult?
Another quirky thing about Zuppa is the really weird artwork on the walls. They have the brick wall decor too (we've lost count of the number of places with this) and some really odd pieces of art hung on the walls without any apparent theme (or artful quality either sadly). It does provide some conversation when one looks at the walls and tries to gauge the mind of the "artist" and/or the individual who decided that they merit such a place of visibility.

Now, if they improved their service, got some real art (or just stick with generic posters/prints quite the like the vintage french they have when you enter) and cut down on the grease....
Note: On Sunday nights, they do not serve the dinner menu but the lunch menu.
Our lunches and dinners averaged $20-$35.

Grade: C (the soup B-). Zuppa 101 N 18th Street, Richmond VA 23223 Google Maps.

ginger thai

I've decided, for the sake of overcoming my inertia to at least get one item off my backlog plate (all bad puns intended) by wrapping up my Ginger Thai review quickly. Twas a dark and stormy night, when I felt that Tom Kha Gai soup would be the ideal antidote and we stepped into Ginger Thai....
I have a (somewhat weak) theory that many (especially Asian) restaurants can be gauged by the quality of their soup. This has stood me in good stead in testing many a Chinese restaurant by the quality of their hot and sour soup and Thai places by their Tom Kha or Tom Yum.
The Tom Kha Gai @ Ginger: The coconut milk was completely missing in action, a weak lime taste, stringy chicken and...... disappointing ! This did not bode well for the rest of the meal.

Spring rolls: decent but completely bland. The entrees (a green curry and garlic chicken): terrible because well....they tasted like Chinese food. Thai cooking is not supposed to taste like Chinese cooking (not that there is anything wrong with Chinese food). There were no hints of basil, lemongrass or anything remotely Thai.
I think I've reached my wordlimit on what I wanted to say about this place.

Bottomline: F. Avoid.

hiatus

what a long hiatus ! Have such a long backlog of restaurants to write about. So, here I go - listing them before I forget:
Sette, Cafe Gutenberg, Sticky Rice, Pomegranate, Mekong, La Grotta, Zuppa, SumoSan, Niwanohana, Ginger Thai, Papa Ningo, Can Can Brasserie

Laziness !!

This is obviously a function of purchasing power, but indexed for inflation and my PP, I think a dinner for 2 (including tax&tip (16-20% of pretax amt) and not including alcohol) under $30 is cheap, $30-$60 moderate and $60-$90 somewhat expensive and >$90 expensive.

Also probably reflected in my (thus far) tepid rating of food here. Something we've felt about restaurants where the check has come to $60 or greater; what I refer to as the "above-average" or "somewhat expensive" set: we were nowhere near as satisfied as the majority of the dinners we had in (my benchmark city) DC. The menu was either unimaginative in at least one or more department, or the food was very dull (I need to find a bunch of synonyms for dull). A lack of imagination/talent in the menu department should be compensated for in taste but alas....
Another observation is how "empty" all these places are at primetime. Maybe we're going to the wrong places....