An Evening in the Twin Cities: 03/01/2009

Saturday, March 07, 2009

Masa Restaurant - March 5, 2009

Her perspective: C

I went to this restaurant as it was part of National Restaurant Week and I wanted to try something new. I was a little disappointed that, despite the fact that we arrived exactly on time for our reservation, we had to wait about 10 minutes for our table. When you only have an hour for lunch, that's unacceptable.

When we were seated, our server was excellent. He upsold me from a regular Coke to a Mexican Coke and was able to tell us the difference. He also explained the two special menus. He was really on the ball the entire time we were there.

The food was very good as well. I had a chicken taco with chipolte cream that was really tasty. The beef torta had way too much cilantro in it and they only offer one salad dressing. It would be nice to have a choice.

Overall, it was a good experience. I went on line to try to find nutritional information on their menu, but could not find any. So, I e-mailed them and got a response that they did not have the resources to keep nutritional information on their menu items as they change frequently, but the individual restaurants have ingredient lists. Ingredients? In other words, if I want to know the nutritional information, I have to get the ingredient list from the restaurant, figure out what the ingredients were that were in the dishes I had and in what proportions, and look up the nutritional information on each ingredient. That's ridiculous. I sent a message back saying that since they cannot provide this information, I will not be eating there any more.

It's a shame, too, because the food and drinks are actually very good. I went back the following day (before I got their e-mail response) for Happy Hour and had a very good margarita. Well, it is pretty far from work...

Background information on your reviewers:

Maryanne was in the restaurant industry for 14 years, including one year as a manager for Chili's Grill and Bar. She has experience in fast food, family chain restaurants (with and without alcohol) and fine dining. She has a Hospitality and Tourism Management degree which gives her an understanding of the service industry including travel, hotel, gaming, food and beverage, and entertainment. She is also an actress with some years experience doing short and feature films, online episodic shows, student films, film projects and contests which include both paid and voluntary roles.

William has none of that experience, but instead has experience eating with and entertaining groups of different sizes in a variety of venues in different areas of the Country. That and a knowledge of how things 'should' work in the entertainment and service worlds. He forms his own opinions from that mix of knowledge using a good dose of common sense and a perception of what he feels people expect from dining out at various venues, seeing movies and such.

Our rating system is just a guide, and no rating system is 100% perfect. We are just married couples, friends and relatives that enjoy movies, eating out and other entertainment in the Twin Cities area, and generally we find that people agree with our assessments of different venues, so we offer this bit of common-man insight to everyone. We feel that we're all pretty average people, and we expect what we think any average person would when we spend money to go places and do things, and we have the same reactions when things go right or wrong as most anyone else would. We offer this blog and our experiences to people so they can know or formulate a better opinion as to whether they might want to spend their money or not at these same places or for the same things.

We know that lots of people don't follow reviews and critics and such because they are paid to do what they do, and they generally spend a lot of time qualifying what they say so that you could make the review mean more than it really does. We are all straight-forward and upfront people, and we're not paid, reimbursed or in some other way compensated for these reviews. Maybe it's just us, but we think that lends us more credibility since we're just doing it because we can and we like to, not because we get paid for doing it.

That said, you have to keep in mind that we aren't pro's or anything, so you'll get a no-nonsense perspective from us. We may seem harsh at times, but you need to remember that in some cases we'd spend a lot of money just to come away with a poor review. It hurts having to spend money on something and have nothing good to show for it, and we feel that other people would have the same reaction we would in cases like that, and our reviews reflect that fact. Along that same line, we like spending a little money and getting more value from it. Our reviews and descriptions should also show that, and that's what we're trying to get across to other people as well.

Again, we aren't compensated for this in any fashion, we just do it because we can, we want to, and to maybe help some other people out in the process.

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Saturday, March 07, 2009

Masa Restaurant - March 5, 2009

Background information on your reviewers: