Firefly Bistro & The Beginning of the End of the Beginning

Yesterday I mentioned briefly that I would be leaving Pasadena soon and it elicited a few questions from people, so I will do a little explaining now. In just over two weeks we will be moving to Brooklyn. Elizabeth got a job offer that was too good to pass up, and I am ready for something different in my life. So, after spending all but one year of my life within a half-hour drive of Pasadena, I will be heading east.

To answer another question that has come up many times: Yes, I will be keeping the blog. Tracie and Bryce made me promise to do so. I will take plenty of pictures of all the places we eat at on our trip across the country as well as the new things I find in New York. I don't know as if I will be able to keep up the pace of 5 or 6 posts per week - I seriously doubt it - but we'll see.

So anyway, there are some places I want to revisit and write about before I go, and a Thursday night at Firefly Bistro for "Burgers, Beer & Blues" was definitely one of them.  I got together a few friends, some of whom have never been to Firefly before, and my parents, who have been there with me several times on Thursdays, and we headed over for dinner last night.


Here is a picture I took on another occasion of Barry Big B Brenner's setup. He uses four guitars and puts on a great show: country folk blues, ragtime, and his take on some classic rock tunes. 

Every Thursday, to accompany the blues, there is a special burger of the week. As I was emailing Carla earlier in the day, I have enjoyed every single one that I have ordered. Last night's looked great: a Cajun shrimp burger with andouille sausage bacon.

"We are out of the shrimp burger," the waiter announced when he first arrived at our table. It was only 7:30.

So all seven of us decided to create our own burger combinations from the list. There was some discussion as to how many toppings would be "too many." I'm not sure we came to an agreement, but I think we decided three should be the maximum.

Firefly also features two beers every Thursday that go for three bucks. Elizabeth and I both ordered the Scrimshaw Pilsner. One minute later the waiter returned to inform us that they were out of that. (I will say this about Firefly: they don't make it easy. My dad ordered the Downtown Brown and after he finished it he ordered another - they ran out of that, too.) 

Tim was thrilled to see the Schonramer Pils, proclaiming that it might be his favorite beer. So he, my mom and Carla each ordered one. I took a sip and agreed it was quite good.

I had a Turbodog, a longtime favorite of mine. Actually, I had three of them. Elizabeth went with Blue Star. (The waiter said, since they'd run out of the beer specials, that he would give us the Turbodog and Blue Star for the $3 price, although I did not see the bill so I'm not sure if he followed through on that.)

 Dave had an Olde Suffolk English Ale.

With my burger, I opted to get bacon, pickled jalapenos, and red chili mustard.

And it was outstanding. I love the potato buns Firefly uses, their meat is always good, and the crunchy bacon and spicy sauces complemented each other nicely. (Dave hates pickles so he offered them to me and I gladly accepted.)

All of us received fries that were cold. It wasn't too big a deal because the burgers and beer were the stars of the show here, but I mention it because it illustrates what I said earlier about Firefly: in every visit, there has always been at least one - usually more - issue that comes up, whether it's running out of their featured burger or beer by 7:30 or serving cold fries. And yet I keep coming back. That's how enjoyable it is there in the tented dining room. It makes all those issues worth it.

This was a fantastic time. Dave and Tim - both guitar players - loved watching the guitarist, especially when he rocked his 12-string, we all really enjoyed our burgers, and the relaxed atmosphere was wonderful.

There are many routines I will miss around Pasadena, and hitting up the South Pasadena farmers market on a Thursday evening then ducking into Firefly for some blues and cold beer is right near the top of the list.

Mi Casa Mexican Food

"The best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie." - Jean-Luc Godard

I love Pasadena, and I'm not just saying that because I'll be leaving it very soon. It was an incredible area in which to grow up. I have a wonderful group of friends - not just the regular characters who appear on this blog but those I grew up with and no longer live around here. Some are lawyers and some are thieves / Some are now behind the sun.

And there have always been many, many dining choices. So when I have a bad restaurant experience, it is never too hard to seek out a better one. I wrote about my least favorite dining experience of the last three months yesterday, now let me tell you about perhaps my best.

I've passed by Mi Casa many, many times and never considered dropping by. Not when I saw the signs in the window advertising taco specials; not even when I saw the sign advertising a bucket of beers for $15 every day between 3 and 5.

And then one day the subject came up - I was asking my friend Tim if he'd ever been there. He had not; he wasn't even sure what I was talking about. As I have written before, it often seems as if Tim knows every restaurant between Orange County and Ventura, so it surprises me when I mention a place that he doesn't know, a surprise that increases exponentially when it's a place in Pasadena.

We needed to try it out, so just a couple of days ago we swung by in the mid afternoon. There is a counter at which you can order food to go, but service if you choose to sit.

 We took a seat next to one of those aforementioned bucket-of-beer specials.

We snacked on chips and salsa while studying the menu. The chips were thick and fresh. The salsa was not particularly flavorful, but still tasty. (After a few bites, I took to shaking a drop of Cholula onto each chip to supplement the salsa, which worked wonderfully.)

I ordered a Pacifico, Tim ordered a medium horchata. We laughed at the size of the "medium" drink.

All of the tacos were listed in Spanish except for the chicken taco (i.e. instead of calling it pollo they call it chicken). I wasn't sure why, but figured I should get one to find out. When asked if I wanted it with onions and cilantro I said yes, and it was just fine like that, though the chicken was definitely on the salty side. So I added a few radishes and some of the provided salsa, which balanced things out a little better. I would have no problem eating one of these again although I'm guessing on my next trip I will experiment with a different taco.

I also ordered an al pastor quesadilla. God I love al pastor, one of the reasons being that you never quite know what you're going to get when you order a taco joint's al pastor for the first time. Sometimes it melts in your mouth like pulled pork, sometimes it's citrus-spiced porcine nuggets. And this time the al pastor was a new flavor: bacon.

This is in no way a complaint. I ate the whole thing - minus the one wedge I gave Tim - and was quite satisfied.

But neither of my dishes satisfied me the way Tim's carne asada burrito satisfied him. "Wow," he said upon first bite, marveling at the flavor combinations. "That's the real deal. I don't understand why anyone would ever go to Taco Bell when this is an option."

"Maybe some people have blogs with twenty readers who want to know about the newest Taco Bell promotion," I added.

He sawed off a piece of burrito and gave it to me. (You didn't really think I gave him a piece of my quesadilla out of the goodness of my own heart, did you?) I really liked it, though not as much as he did. But then again I've always preferred al pastor and pollo chicken to carne asada.

I will close with this photo because I love it most out of the bunch. If the collage at the top of this page hadn't proved itself so popular, I could easily just replace it with this photo.

Mi Casa was a fantastic experience and I hope I have the chance to make it back.

Quadrupel Brasserie

I'm not sure what's happened to this place.

Three times I have mentioned Quadrupel: a dinner with a group of friends shortly after it opened, a birthday dinner two years ago, and a lunch one year ago on a gorgeous, 85-degree January day. All three times I really liked my food - even going so far as to say I loved some of the items - and all three times the place was crowded with people. Everyone, including me, having a good time.

I went to lunch with my parents the other day at Quadrupel and although we were there more than one hour, there was not a single other customer was in sight (as you can see from the photos). By the end of the meal, it was easy to understand why. 

The menu has been tweaked a little over the years but quite a few of the same items remain. 

The pommes frites are listed under the starters on the menu. "We'd like to start with some pommes frites," I told the waiter. I thought these two things made it clear that they would be an appetizer. 

Saison Dupont has been kicking ass on my friend Nick's blog, Beer Vs Beer Vs Beer, so I thought I would give it another try. It was not as unpleasant as I remembered it being and I enjoyed the citrus flavors, but it's still too sweet for me to have more than one.

I loved the heavy knives the waiter brought us prior to receiving our food.

At one point I turned to see our waiter bringing our entrees. My burger was served with a large helping of fries. There was nothing on the menu indicating that it would be. "I didn't realize it came with fries," I said.

"We decided to give you some," he replied.

"But what about the fries we ordered as an appetizer?"

"They're coming."

I guess I shouldn't complain about being given more food than I ordered, but this still annoyed me. I mentioned, when writing about Zeke's two weeks ago, a trend I have experienced several times already in 2012: restaurants serving their food differently than advertised on the menu, and always shrugging off any questions about it. If I had known that my burger was going to come with fries, I would not have ordered a $6 plate of them, I would have just shared these with my parents.

And, of course, I had ordered the fries as an appetizer, which I was now being told would arrive after our entrees.

I had also ordered my burger medium-rare. There was only the slightest tinge of pink in the center of the burger, pretty much the definition of medium-well. When I order a twelve-dollar hamburger, I don't want the flavor cooked out of it. I can understand a mistake like this in a busy restaurant when the cooks have multiple burgers on the grill, but as I wrote above, we were the only customers there.

I considered sending it back, but I didn't want to wait another twenty minutes.

My mom had ordered her steak sandwich medium-rare as well. It had a little more pink than my burger, but just barely.

Thankfully, my dad really liked his croque monssiuer, eating all of it.

More than ten minutes after we received our entrees - so more than half an hour after we'd placed the order - we received our pommes frites. (I asked my parents if I should just send them back, but they said no.) They were enjoyable, although I missed the selection of several dipping sauces that I used to receive at Quadrupel. This had an interesting mayo but regular ketchup. (The cumin ketchup on my last trip was outstanding and I inquired if they still had it; the waiter couldn't give me a straight answer but it was obvious he had no idea what I was talking about.)

This was the least enjoyable meal I have had in quite a while. Apathetic service (the waiter ignored us for almost the whole meal, choosing instead to stand in the bar and watch Food Network on the flatscreen TV), incorrectly-cooked meat, and a bill three times the price of what it would have been had we gone to, say, Dog Haus or Congregation.

I have no idea if Quadrupel has a new owner or new chef or what is going on. I also don't understand how everyone else knew to stay away and I didn't. But I will from now on.