Ruby Tuesday

Ruby Tuesday
250 Davidson Ave
Somerset, NJ

On my flights, I usually sleep. No, really! While sometimes there are good movies, under the influence of Gravol/Dramamine, forget about it. This time, even the fact the movies were food related did not help! Among the movies available were Julie & Julia, Babettes Gæstebud (aka, Babette’s Feast) and, if memory serves me right, Big Night. Heck, just for kicks, I grabbed my copy of the On-Board magazine as it feature some food related topics, like restaurants in Vancouver (a brief look at it focused mostly on fine dining. Sigh…). On an unrelated note, I was flying Air Canada and, despite all the crap said about it, for a North American airline, it isn’t that bad, specially considering the issues I had flying with US Airways, including me being in a watchlist…

But, back to the topic, after getting myself terribly lost near Newark, I eventually hit the highways and arrived to the hotel… At 9:00 p.m… Hungry at that point, as I just had breakfast and skipped all the in-flight snacks and meals (I was testing a theory, that if you arrive hungry and tired you might as well eat something and hit bed to more easily overcome jet lag, in this case, I will have to say it worked!), I went at the closest place available: Ruby Tuesday

Not sure what would be the best way to describe it. May be a typical casual dining restaurant (on the same veins as TGI Fridays, Applebee’s or Bennigan’s)? The ambiance was more on the lines of a TGI Friday’s catered towards an older customer base. Other than some staff, easily I was the only person in my age group! But, then again, it was a Sunday night, an hour before their 10:00 p.m. closing time.

While perusing through the menu, it looked it had some interesting options but I ran into something that bugged me slightly: what would be something safe to order at that time of the day when the kitchen is about to shut down? After some debate (which didn’t help because each minute spent on that meant “wasted” time they could use to prepare my order), I decided to start with…

Before anybody says this like a sloppy salad, well, that was because I assembled it myself. What happens is that, for a token (?) $3.00 added to your order, you can hit the salad bar. In my case, I badly needed some veggies (considering what I had for breakfast). In my plate, some marinated/dressed cucumber, mushroom, tomatoes and apple salad and, one item that a lot of people seem to dislike: beets. I won’t delve into that topic other than the salad bar was good enough to get started for…

What I consider to be one of the most innocuous items in the menu: chicken. Yup, on the plate, two (small) chicken breast smothered with some BBQ sauce. On the side, mashed potato and some more vegetables. I am not sure if Vancouver has gone ahead of others but the mashed potato was just average. I mean, it did not have some garlic-y addition to it, not even anything butter-y. I guess some people like their mashed potato “plain” and they would rather have it that way. As for the vegetables, not much to talk about. It was just OK. Finally, the chicken. When I mentioned innocuous, you can have an idea of what to expect. If it wasn’t because of that sauce, I would have to say it was tasteless. Not that adding the BBQ sauce made it much better, as it had some unnatural (as in strange) taste to it. If I had a good thing to say about the chicken would be to mention it wasn’t dry.

Overall, it fulfilled the mission it was supposed to: provide me with something to eat in an unknown place on Sunday at 9:00 p.m. Not in a hurry in any way to come back but, still, I can see it has some qualities of its own (i.e., catered towards a specific population) and why people would like to come. For me, I will rather try something else…

Tagged under: Chain Restaurant • Chicken • Diner • New Jersey