I am not the hardest person in the world to please when it comes to food. That might be my son. However, I can be picky as well.
Recently I got an email in my inbox about prix fixe dining at the Dockside location right off Commercial St. in Malden. The deal was an appetizer, two entrees and a dessert for $20. When my wife said she wanted to eat out near home last night, instead of shlepping all the way to Somerville to our favorite Mexican place, I suggested we try the nearby Dockside and see if it was OK.
We went inside and were seated promptly. Our hostess was also our server. When I dithered between the beer-battered haddock or the 10 oz. ribeye, she suggested the fish. My wife ordered the eggplant parmesan over linguini. We got buffalo fingers for our appetizer and ended up with a bowl of ice cream for dessert as they were out of brownies for the sundae. The children split an order of chicken fingers with French fries ($5.99).
The children's meal was actually quite good. The fingers were properly cooked, the fries were crunchy, and the kids enjoyed the food. The buffalo fingers appetizer was also good, with the chicken properly cooked and not dried out -- a common hazard of such fare. The buffalo sauce was a little salty for me, but most people on regular diets should be fine with that level. My wife tried the bleu cheese dressing and said it tasted more like tartar sauce, with disappointing flavor.
My wife's eggplant parmesan came out at the same time as my fish. Her dish looked appetizing, but the pasta was nowhere near as good as what we cook at home. The eggplant and cheese were devoured, but most of the pasta got left in the bowl. Since Boston's North End has had its cuisine migrate around greater Boston over the past few decades, and since we're used to buying good dried pasta for personal use, we rather expect good quality pasta when we go out to eat locally. This was low-end pizza shop quality pasta.
My fish came out looking like a plank of flat wood, which told me that the haddock was definitely frozen before hitting the fryer and the batter was probably frozen too. The fish was acceptably crunchy on the outside and not particularly dry on the inside, but it wasn't thrilling, as it had no hint of beer flavor anywhere in the batter. The side of green beans was properly cooked, a small bowl filled with short-cut, wide beans reminiscent of cafeteria style. They were good with a little added butter. I should have tried the ribeye instead.
The major disappointment for me was the dessert. One of the choices was a brownie sundae, which we ordered, but the kitchen was out of brownies at 5:45PM on a weeknight. Our server did her best to make sure we got a dessert we would like, in this case offering the sundae without the brownie. Now, I admit to being a bit of a snob about high-quality ice cream -- this is greater Boston, the ice cream consumption capital of the world -- but I'll eat Hoodsie cups sometimes too. This sundae was disappointing: chocolate ice cream with whipped cream, covered not with hot fudge but with Hershey's chocolate syrup or something that tastes very much the same. The syrup detracted from the chocolate of the ice cream and muddied the sweetness of the whipped cream, neither of which were top quality to begin with. A proper fudge sauce would have gone a long ways to salvage this, but scraping the drizzled sauce off the ice cream and whipped cream was an exercise in frustration.
We tipped our server decently as she had done her best to keep us happy, but she was handicapped by a kitchen working with frozen prepared food, low-grade pasta and substandard ice cream. Hopefully their ribeye steaks are fresh, but I don't think I'm going back to find out. The next time we want a decent meal out and don't want to spend a lot of money, we're probably shlepping to Somerville for Mexican food.
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