Oh Great. We Had To Eat Out Twice In A Row. Ugh.

This morning, Mr. Hawthorne and I took off to Manteo, to the North Carolina Division of Motor Vehicles (tags and crap bureau - to be distinguished from the license bureau - in a totally different place - the SAME DAMN BUREAU THAT MADE ME CHANGE MY FUCKING NAME BACK IN JANUARY WHEN I WENT TO RENEW MY LICENSE EVEN THOUGH THE IRS IS COOL WITH MY NAME. Sorry, didn't mean to yell. But it just frosts my butt.)
Gee, you'd think they'd put these two offices in the same building with maybe the same phone number so that normal people could actually get them on the phone.
If you ever call either number, you get a busy signal.
If you finally get through,
you find they have lunch from 12:30-1:30 and on certain random days, from 1:00 to 3:00.

Mr. H. and I finally get to the License part of the NC-DMV. It's in a PHARMACY, and
Mr. H. is 7th in LINE.
I browse the pharmacy.
I read the latest People. Crapola.
The pharmacy has a bunch of crappy shit and shitty crap.

Finally, after waiting for what seems forever, Mr. Hawthorne gets to the head of the class.
Mr. H: "I need a license tag. Here's the Title."
Mz. DMV: "Great. I need the bill of sale."
Mr. H: "Huh? Isn't that in there?"
Mz. DMV: "NO."

Mr. H looks sadly at me, like it's my fault.
HEY, had I known what he didn't, I would have told him to bring the bill of sale.
How else do you pay the tax?
(Also, you need proof of insurance, which the lady didn't bother to tell us. Mr. H. called the DMV back and found out that little nugget. Else, we would've wasted another trip and had more bad food and still have no tags.)

So, we left Manteo, tagless.
A twenty-mile wasted trip, forty miles round trip, with gas at $3.99/gallon.
Aaaaaaaaannnnnnd ...........we decide to go to lunch.
Might as well spend some more money.


Now ... One of the best places to eat on the Outer Banks is Darrell's in Manteo.
Darrell's always has great service and consistent, wonderful food.
We love it.
The seafood is perfectly fried.
Good hush puppies and I don't generally even like hush puppies.

BUT, did we go to Darrell's?
NOOOOOO!


Stripers was one of the restaurants that came to one of the NC Aquarium Cooking Classes.
And had one of the best presentations and food.

We've been there 3 times already, and each time I had a $10 coupon. Thank God.
So, we went to Stripers.

If you recall, yesterday Mr. H. and I were up in Currituck at Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mr. H. was jonesin' for the HOUSE salad, and instead he got the SIDE salad,
and bitched and moaned for 2 hours plus about it.

So, today, we're stuck in Manteo with nothing to show, because he didn't bring the bill of sale, and it's lunchtime.
"Well, since it was so BAD yesterday,
why DON'T we REPEAT it TODAY?"
"Well, sure. LET'S!!!"

OK, the salads arrive.
They're nice to look at and quite tasty.

We both had the Chimmy-Churrie-Blue Cheese, and the Blue Cheese is good, although I don't know what the chimmy-churrie is about it. And I don't know how to spell Chimmie Churry.
I also asked to try the Tequila Lime Caesar dressing, in which I could taste no tequila nor lime, only a kind of heavy sweet flavor in the dressing which I didn't care for much at all.

Mr. Hawthorne got the soup and sandwich.
A seafood chowder and a grilled tuna fish salad sandwich.

Oh, by the way, see those croutons piled on top of the chowder, same as the ones on the salad?
They were stale.

Now, I tasted his bisque/chowder.
The flavor was sublime.
Absolutely delicious.
But, WHERE'S THE SEAFOOD?"
Way too many taters.
And the potatoes were too big.
And when I took this pic, Mr. H. had already eaten over half the taters in the cup.
Those are the uneaten taters on the side of the plate that he had picked out.

Oh. The tuna salad.
SO SALTY.
Couldn't eat it.

Now, here's my entree.

And can I just tell you?
I ALWAYS have entree envy.
Usually, I'll see somebody else in the restaurant having what I wished I'd ordered instead of what I actually did.

Oh Crappola.
I thought I ordered a Mahi Mahi Quesadilla.
I KNOW I did.

Yes. Yes. I did.
So, what is this?

Sadly, this is the mahi mahi quesadilla.

Mahi mahi, or dolphin fish, is a very delicate fish.
Why would anyone do this to it?
And those chunks of protein could be anything, hell, that could be skunk fritters in there for all I know, since the sauce overpowered whatever you could possibly put in there.


What happened to the dolphin fish was GodAwful.

It was overpowered with CRAP.

The sauce on the very top wasn't bad, just too little of it.
It was a Habanero Ranch dressing, in which I tasted no habanero but did taste a slight mustard flavor. Not bad.

The red sauce on the inside.
That was something different altogether.
Had I wanted a Hooters-style Buffalo Wings sauce (which I didn't)
I would've gone to Hooters (over my dead body).
It was very vinegary and peppery and unpalatably SALTY.
Atrocious.

Oh, the service sucked too.
Slow, inattentive, and no refills for the drinks.
Bitch never checked on us.
See the empty glasses?
And we really needed something to drink since we'd been sitting at a salt lick
for what seemed forever.

I tasted one triangle of the quesadilla, moving stuff around on my plate, trying it with the mushy tomatoes and green onions and huge mound of sour cream.
Mr. Hawthorne tried it too.
It was quite horrible.

Unfortunately, we still have one more $10 coupon, so we'll try one more time.

Remember what Mr. Hawthorne said yesterday about the chef checking every plate that came back from the tables to see whether his food was eaten or not?
Well, do you think they'd get a clue with my sending back 3/4 of my meal and Mr. Hawthorne sending back a pile of potato chunks picked out of his chowder?

While we waited interminably for the waitress to come back, Mr. H. came up with a wonderful idea. He suggested we bring little toothpicks with flags glued to them on which we can write criticisms and stick them into the food for anyone who notices to read.
"Too many GD potatoes!"
"If I'd wanted potato soup, I would've ordered it."
"This shit is too friggin' salty."
"Tastes like crap."
"Salad was good. That's why there's NONE left.

Oh, and the funniest thing:
When we finally got the waitress's attention and asked for the bill,
Mr. H. started talking to her.
We told her about the saltiness of both his tuna and my mahi mahi and about all the potatoes as fillers in his chowder and she said she'd mention it to the apparently tastebudless "chef."
Then he added, "You know, we're restaurant critics and this will be on the Internet."
I don't think she was impressed.
But it was still quite funny.
I think Mr. Hawthorne is letting my blog go to his head.