Today, due to a sudden twist of fate, I found myself at Good to Go for lunch. They are owned by Hemisphere Restaurants who are the same people that own Mission American Kitchen and previously owned Kabobi neither of which impressed me. I have passed this location by numerous times before and while I thought it looked ok, I really wasn’t sure what they served and I wasn’t about to duck in without reading up on it first. Unfortunately I didn’t have that opportunity today either and yet I found myself inside and having to make a choice, fast.

I will admit that anything I write below will be influenced by the fact that I have a stuffed up nose. I am functioning well today but yesterday I was totally worthless. I was living on Dayquil, six to be exact, mostly so I could survive the 2.5 hours last night at the Rosemount Community Center and another two writing up about UMore Park’s future development as a strip mine to benefit the University’s failed football program.

Anyway, I walked in the door and knew I needed something that had strong flavors so I could actually taste the food. They were advertising a buffalo chicken salad special so I went with that. There have sandwiches, wraps, soups and salads but I didn’t even look at the menu hanging on the wall. I told the first woman behind the counter what I wanted and she yelled down the line to the next person. The next server asked again what I wanted and then set out to make it so. She dumped fresh lettuce into the bowl in the serving line and then took several scoops out into a mixing bowl. She added a scoop of halved cherry tomatoes, some celery and then some blue cheese. She went to the cooler behind her and nabbed some buffalo chicken and threw it, in two large hunks, into the mixing bowl and then started tossing it all together.

I had some problems with the execution of this part though. First, the mixing bowl had the remnants of someone else’s salad left behind. If you have any allergies to anything, I don’t suggest you eat here or at least ask that they use a fresh bowl. I didn’t have the time to be picky today so I just let it slide but I certainly would never permit them to do this again. I fucking hate black olives and I can taste the tiniest bits in anything and I assume that the Greek salad they made before mine had olives because I could taste that nasty shit with every last bite. My second complaint was that they didn’t slice the buffalo chicken after they removed it from the cooler. They had some plain chicken breast that was sliced perfectly under the glass but the buffalo version came in two huge slabs. I’m all about a lot of chicken and I appreciated it but when I’m paying $7.13 for a salad and then eating it with plastic cutlery in a tiny ass plastic bowl, I at least expect it to be at least in a manageable format so that I don’t end up spilling shit all over myself as I work my way through the meat.

Aside from the black olive flavor that overpowered the dish, it was decent. I probably won’t eat there again just because of their knack for reusing dirty salad bowls as part of their “hand tossed” preparation. $7.13 for a salad with little more than tomatoes, chicken, cheap blue cheese, and celery was a bit much for me, YMMV.

See all the pictures from today’s lunch on Flickr here.

Related posts:

1. Lyon’s Pub with Kimmy and Aaron: Minneapolis, MN
2. The Burger Place: Minneapolis, MN
3. Memory Lanes and the Flashback Cafe and Cocktail Lounge: Minneapolis, MN
4. Fake Italian Food and Fake Chinese Food!