Jerry's 27th Street Market

Okay, I think I've let my last review have enough time in the spotlight.  I've had several other mediocre to bad experiences lately, but just at the moment I feel like focusing on the positive.  Positive for yours truly includes (but isn't limited to) such things as multi-ethnic cuisine, home-style cooking, and odd locations that many people might hesitate to go for a meal.  These things warm my heart, and there's one place you can go to get all of them...

Bono's - Real Chicago Food?

Although I've been referred to as a food or restaurant critic by friends and acquaintances (usually with a smirk), I shy away from the term and would never use it to describe myself.  After all, someone with the word "critic" in their description usually gets paid for their output.  I consider myself a food enthusiast, and as such I try to focus more on the positive.  If I find a restaurant's food to be mediocre or otherwise not suiting my particular tastes, but not really bad, I usually won't bother writing them up at all.  If I think the prices are a wee bit high, I usually keep my mouth shut.  Atrocious customer service is more likely to get a public mention from me, if only on Urbanspoon or my Facebook page.  But if you stack up two or three of these kinds of issues, I'm probably going to be tempted to let people know that their money would be better spent elsewhere.  You can probably tell where I'm going with this, but if you're the kind of person who likes details, click the link and allow me to elaborate...

Joe Momma's Breakfast (and Lunch) Eatery

I'm a big fan of aggregate review sites.  My favorite food-related one is Urbanspoon, and I will check reviews on Yelp on occasion, though I take them with a grain of salt.  The information I've found has been very beneficial, especially when researching places to eat while traveling.  However, they can steer you wrong on occasion.  People can be spiteful, and all it takes is one table with a little internet knowledge and an over-inflated sense of entitlement to skew a restaurant's rating.  If an eatery is relatively new and has only been rated by a handful of people, a group of three or four vindictive types can really impact a star or percentage rating.

When my roommate suggested Joe Momma's for breakfast one day, I shot her down pretty quickly.  The restaurant had a very good score on Yelp, but only due to a number of extremely negative reviews being "filtered" (translate: not counted against their overall score), and their Urbanspoon rating was, and still is, low.  Some time later, she finally ended up going with her father and came back determined to get me to try the place.  Now I don't always agree with this woman's tastes, but one of the few things we agree on is our love of breakfast.  So far we've seen eye to eye on every place we've gone to eat it, from our love of Goldy's to our outright hatred of The Griddle.  Needless to say, her insistence finally won me over.  As usual.

Big Daddy's Barbecue 2: Electric Boogaloo

Well my last review was kind of lame, seeing as how it was basically a photo gallery with a few random comments, so of course I figure why not do the same thing again?  I first encountered Big Daddy's Barbecue when they was serving up delicious meats from a shack in front of Cabela's (read about it here).  I've stated on more than one occasion since then that Hoss makes the best pulled pork to be had in the Boise area, and my feelings about that haven't changed one iota.  When he picked up and moved his operation to Kuna a few months later, I was crushed.  Where was I to get a barbecue fix on my lunch breaks now?  Fortunately for me, he built up enough of a following to take a location in Meridian that had housed a couple of failed Hawaiian eateries and turn it into a place where I can get those delicious porcine shreds six days a week.  There's not a lot to say that I didn't say the first time around, so what follows will once again be a selection of pictures, ranging from crappy (old camera) to not-quite-so-crappy (camera phone) to moderately okay (new camera).  Yes, I finally got a new camera, and I fully expect my pictures to improve as I get used to it.  The best thing about it is the speed, with my current record from "power off" to "decent picture" being just under three seconds.  But enough about my limited photography skills.  Let's look at some meat!

The Green Chile

Okay, so I know my output has been pretty sporadic the last year or so.  It was starting to feel a little like work, and then I had a rather discouraging stint as a freelance journalist that kind of killed my interest in writing at all for some time.  And beyond that, there just aren't enough hours in the day.  However, just because I've been sucking at posting regularly, it doesn't mean that I don't still go out to eat, or that I haven't been trying new places.  But without the time or motivation to write regularly, I've been visiting places multiple times and spending more time revisiting old favorites. 

Recently, someone dropped me an e-mail and advised that I really needed to check out The Green Chile.  Ashamed, I had to admit to him that I've actually been there more than half a dozen times and I've just been too lazy to write it up.  I think it's time to rectify that.