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Ate: December 17, 2005 Published: December 25, 2005 $$$ My wife and I were talking about where to go for this week's review and she pointed out to me that we hadn't made it down to Pawleys Island yet. We don't want to leave any part of the Grand Strand out of our search and drove south with gusto. Once we got to around Litchfield Beach, we started looking out for restaurants. We made a full run of this stretch of the strand, discussing our options before narrowing it down to a couple of options. We pulled into the first one and checked out their menu. It had a lot of potential, and my eyes quickly zeroed in on a dish whose description contained the words "feta cheese." I'm a sucker for feta cheese and those two words alone sold it for me and we entered the Island Café & Deli for dinner. When you enter Island Café & Deli, you first go into the bar and their small dining room. There is a larger dining room through a doorway, but it was just my wife and myself, so we were seated up front in this smaller dining room. The entire place is decorated in rich, dark wood paneling that gives it a very intimate feel. It was fairly early so there weren't very many people there when we came in, but during our meal there was a steady influx of diners. Our salads arrived very quickly, even before the appetizer we had ordered. This was a bit unexpected, but we took it in stride and eagerly set to them. Just from looking at the salads, we could tell that the kitchen had given them a little more care and effort than the average salad gets around here. Instead of the usual, semi-generic greens we usually see, these salads had good, crisp romaine lettuce, not to mention a few other varieties of lettuce we couldn't name. As an added bonus, my raspberry vinaigrette dressing had some sliced almonds in it, adding a little extra crunch to my salad. Right on cue, our waiter brought out our appetizer while we were finishing up our salads. The large pile of quick-fried calamari had been cooked to a beautiful golden-brown color and smelled mouth-wateringly good. The taste did not disappoint. Neither one of us considers ourselves an expert on cephalopods, but we both agreed that this was the best calamari that we've ever eaten. The homemade cocktail sauce and the jalapeno remoulade that accompanied the seafood made it a wonderful appetizer. The two of us were practically giving each other high-fives, thrilled that we had found another great restaurant. Then the waiter came and brought our main courses, and that brought us crashing back down to earth. My bride had ordered one of their evening specials, blackened salmon and shrimp over grits. Yes, grits. Seafood, usually shrimp, and grits is a common dish here in the South Carolina low country. Normally, it is a very savory dish with lots of flavor. Not this time. I took a couple of bites of her dinner and I had to agree with her assessment, this was the blandest blackened fish we have ever eaten. The blackening seasoning seemed to have been added more as an afterthought than actually being integral to the cooking process. The accompanying shrimp and the grits were also pretty bland as well. She managed to salvage it and make it not too bad by adding a lot of salt and pepper to it. As I mentioned earlier, I'm a sucker for feta cheese and had ordered a dish called Shrimp Athena. The menu describes Shrimp Athena as "Shrimp tossed with spinach, feta cheese, tomatoes over linguine." That's a pretty good description of what I got, and I really thought it was going to be better than it was. Before I continue, I do want to ask a question. Classic seafood hut peel-n-eat shrimp aside, whose bright idea is it to leave the tail shells on the shrimp in your dish? I'm especially curious as to who thinks it is a good idea for pasta dishes. Two weeks earlier, my wife and I were having dinner with my family up in North Carolina and I had ordered a seafood fettuccini dish. Just like our dinners tonight, the shrimp in that dish still had the tail shells on them. You're forced to stop every few moments and get your hands messy while you finish peeling the shell off of a few shrimp, and then repeat the process until your dinner is done. I guess it is supposed to be part of the dining "experience," but it just annoys the heck out of us. The kitchen staff is already having to go through the work to shell the shrimp halfway, is it that really much more effort to finish peeling the critters? I'm sure that people a lot more sophisticated than the two of us are reading this and rolling their eyes. If there's a legitimate reason for not peeling the shrimp all the way, we'd like to know what it is. Now that my unpeeled shrimp rant is out of the way, let me get back onto my train of thought. When they say "tossed. . . over linguine," they mean exactly that and nothing more. I guess I was expecting it to go back in the oven after everything as combined, to let the flavors meld and the cheese to get soft. That didn't happen. The whole thing was lukewarm. The aforementioned tail shells on the shrimp made it a tedious meal, meaning that it was that much colder by the time I got halfway through it. And just like my wife's dinner, this was very bland. Not much in the way of spices at all. I'm not someone who usually adds much, if any, salt to my meal, but this one required a lot of it. We need to make sure and tell you that during this whole dinner, the wait staff was never anything but excellent. Our waiter was friendly, attentive, polite and prompt. His efforts kept a bad meal from becoming a truly bad experience. His efforts were definitely appreciated and we did not let the food's quality affect his tip. We left the Island Café & Deli very disappointed. Our initial elation at the salads and calamari did not survive contact with the entrees. While, we did not enjoy our meal, these bad experiences are just as valuable as our good ones. Their menu is a little pricey, but is pretty much in line with a lot of the other moderately upscale restaurants along the beach. Reservations are recommended and we saw several diners come in during our time there, including a party of eleven. We hope for the sake of the Island Café & Deli that we just had bad luck and caught them on a bad night. But our experience is all we can go on, and based on that, we cannot recommend this restaurant. |
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