It's a bright, warm, sunny day on Treasure Island and me and the SO are traipsing through the weekend flea market here. It's gotten a lot bigger since the last time we came by--more vendors and fortunately more food choices. After wandering down the length of the row of offerings I settle on one that I haven't seen before called Cheese Gone Wild. Their specialty is variations of grilled cheese sandwiches and something buttery, crunchy and cheesy sounds really good right now.
Now between The Melt and the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen here in San Francisco, the grilled cheese has been done to varying degrees of success. Their menu is compact and I decide to chow down on an Alcatraz Island Melt.
Grilled steak in their homemade steak sauce, caramelized onions, mushrooms, gruyere cheese, swiss cheese on grilled and butter organic shepherd white bread (which is something I think they sell at Trader Joe's by the way) and a side of cole slaw. From a visual stand point it looked pretty good. Golden brown and buttery on the outside with a little cheese dripping out the sides. I pick up a half and bite into it and chew and chew and chew and chew and well, you get the point. The steak was overcooked and if there was steak sauce on here I missed it, matter of fact if there was seasoning of any kind on here it must have cooked off when they were over grilling the meat. Bland is a word that comes to mind. There should have been some tang to it from either the gruyere or the swiss at least but there wasn't. In fact when I opened the sandwich there wasn't really all that much cheese inside. It was even worse in the other half of the sandwich, seems most of the ingredients had migrated to one side leaving little for the other half. I'm not sure how many more ways I can say this was a flavorless mess, I couldn't even finish it. And just so you know it wasn't only me, the SO got the same sandwich and didn't like it either--this from a person who is willing to try anything and gives most places a pass.
And don't even get me started on the cole slaw...ugh...it has to be one of the worst things I've ever tasted. Flat, tasteless--like eating cardboard--or more precisely tasting like the plastic bag it came out of. Not good, not good at all.
In basic cooking terms it seems so simple to be able to pull off at least a decent sandwich. I mean grilled bread, butter, melted cheese--how can you go wrong? Well, I can say in this instance very, very wrong. Too bad, I was hungry, but this pretty much killed my appetite. Sigh...at least there is plenty of shopping opportunities to assuage my pain.
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