What I didn’t like about Stevie Ray’s soft fish tacos:

1. Too spicy hot. My taste buds were so preoccupied fighting the chili burns that it couldn’t taste anything else. I tried to tone down the flavor with sour cream and salad but the salad seemed permeated by the same spice only hotter!

2. Fish strips were too short – almost like curds. They either piled up or flopped out of the taco. You remember the school cafeteria progression? Steaks on Monday, Hamburger on Tuesday, spaghetti and Meatballs on Wednesday, mystery meatloaf on Thursday, etc… I felt like it was Wednesday and some other customer who got there before me had the full fillet.

3. Too wet. The corn tortillas were soggy and messy. This also made the corn tortillas droopy, putting more pressure on the dry structure and causing them to split more.

4. Soft corn tortillas weren’t softened. Whatever parts weren’t dripping in soggy mess were splitting apart, as mentioned earlier.

5. Condiments were old. The guacamole was brownish green and the sour cream was coagulated.

6. Sides did not compliment the meal. The “coleslaw” seemed to have been soaked in the cayenne pepper which meant that trying to cool your tongue by eating the only side you had to the meal made the experience even more painful.

7. With the old condiments, lack of original sides and geometrically placed tacos sagging around the sides of the platter, the dish appeared as appetizing as fast food. I already had an ill conceived idea of what dinner experience my mouth would suffer in the next half hour.

Thoughts on solutions:
1. Use a milder Creole spice rather than the spicy Cajun variety.

2. Use more butter than before to keep the fillets from breaking apart while cooking and cut the fish fillets into longer strips AFTER they’ve been pan fried with a very sharp knife. If cut prior to frying, coat them in an egg-white spice mix to hold the structure of the flesh and lock in the flavor.

3. Dry on one platter, wet on another. Even if the wet platter is a bowl in the center – keep the wet away from the dry. And drain the oil off the fish before sticking them in the corn tortillas. Add well drained – very well drained – ingredients to the taco like slightly under ripe tomatoes and black beans. These add flavor without the squish.

4. Press corn tortillas in very hot steam to soften them. Try sprinkling a little cheese all over a slightly moist corn tortilla (this will add structure) then super heat it in a dry pan. That will make it pliable. Also offer a flour tortilla option.

5. Repeat after me … fresher is better. That aside – guacamole turns brown in about half an hour after it’s been exposed to air. Lime or lemon juice help deter the oxidation process. Only make guacamole on an as need basis. Don’t make a bowl of it at 10 AM to scoop out at 5 PM. Yuck! To keep sour cream from coagulating, use a fattier option and mix with a little bit of whole milk. Also – plain sour cream? Be more original. Use plain white yogurt or sour cream infused with sun-dried tomatoes. That tang will give a twist that will make conversation.

6. There’s got to be something more original or flavorful than chopped white lettuce soaked in cayenne pepper. Rice. Rice and fish go great together. So does polenta. Try a little gumbo on the side. These make interesting sides that compliment the dish, not detract from it.

7. Take a plating course. Look at foodie blogs to see how plates are arranged. Don’t place in symmetrical patterns flat across the plate, but use some level of vertical direction. Add a sliced and twisted orange with a sprig of cilantro over the top to add zest and appeal.

That’s it.

I enjoy restaurants that make effort in providing healthy and natural dishes. Stevie Ray’s Eastside Grill is one of the few mainstream restaurants that put forth this effort.

It’s “mainstream” because it’s not another Adams Mountain Cafe, Dale Street Cafe, Gertrudes or Olive Branch. In other words, it doesn’t appear to cater specifically to health nuts. You can order fish and chips or burgers like most other American food restaurants, but it’s not some disgusting MSG laden chain like Applebees, Red Robin, TGIF or others similar. Even my son who has an arsenal of food allergies can eat the burgers from the kids menu.

The restaurant is very family oriented with old classic cartoons beaming from television sets around the dining hall to the model trains that circle above your head. It also has a classy feel, which is unusual for family restaurants and gives this eating locale a character and charm of its own.

Instead of bringing out the typical complimentary oily GMO chips and salsa or fatty flavored fries, it’s a plate full of crunchy carrot sticks with dressing to dip them in. When you order regular fries, it’s potato strings, oil and salt. You can ask for healthy options when ordering and the waitresses and waiters are quick with their answers which I take as a queue that they are asked these questions often and the restaurant is becoming more known in the circles of natural food eaters as an enjoyable outing.

They offer an interesting burger that most people might first wince at. Imagine a bacon burger with peanut butter instead of ketchup. Don’t laugh. Think about oriental food – Chiang Mai steaks, or Szechuan Beef – and you’ll recall the combination of nutty and meaty timbre throughout the meal. The burger seems to be one of the local favorites because of its unique yet pleasing flavor.

I had the fish tacos, which was probably one of the lesser items on the menu. Even the side condiments were sad in appearance and texture. The owner of the restaurant seems attentive and desirous of his customer’s comments but was busy waiting on tables so I left a comment on their cards for him to get to later. I was thinking today of what could have made the fish tacos great and thought up some points on how to improve them. That’s what the next blog will be about.

For now, do better than me and if you order something that you don’t like, tell the waitress or waiter and have it fixed. These are not the type of chefs that would spit in your food like those who work in other places (especially chain or snobbish restaurants – and there are plenty of horror stories out there that are too disgusting to mention). These are chefs and employees who work closely with the cheerful owner who takes humble honor in running his business.

I give it four and a half out of six forks.

Interesting how recent bipartisan attention about the lap-dog behavior of the mainstream media has recently erupted. In high school of all places, one of my instructors, quoting someone I can’t remember, stated that in the near future more people will realize that true news isn’t from newspapers, television, radio, books or schoolrooms. Instead, newsworthy truths will be shared but over podiums in the churches, benches in the locker rooms, cup dispensers near the water coolers and seats in the bars.

People have been boiling over the lies in the main stream media for decades, but have remained quiet. So why the sudden change, now? Perhaps it is because people were promised change, foolishly believed it, ignorantly voted for it, and received a series of events that included politicians gleefully raising tax burdens of the common man to pay for the millionaire bailouts instead … and you can’t tell this same public that our highly intelligent president knew nothing about how the money would be spent. Perhaps it’s because, acting like a good American, we do what we’re told day after day to wake up one day realizing we’re a slave to a national debt that had been building up and hidden – swept away – while the media continued to feed out lies about how great the economy was because we were doing what Americans do (whatever that means).

So it turns out that people are waking up and realizing that main stream media is a lap-dog to the feds, a fat-cat to their advertisers and a circus monkey to the government that sits between the two. The real stories are often ignored from the press while a distracting story is burnished and reprinted with the same degree of accuracy, conjecture and falsehood as a high-school crack dealer trying to convince a jury of his innocence. It makes for a great show, but it makes you sick when you step back and realize how much time and money is wasted over the endeavor.

It’s refreshing to see a generation that was called crazy conspiracy theorists finally get proper exposure – baptist preachers being beaten by executive officers for standing up for his constitutional rights, bloggers being imprisoned for videotaping a police state gone wild, celebrities being called crazy and mocked for telling people that their fears from the pharmaceutical megaliths don’t make them crazy despite what the government and main stream media says publicly.

As taught in grade school political science, any institution given all three of the legislative, executive and judicial power becomes a disease to the world. Even the Bible forbade anyone other than God Himself of being all three, though it was often called by the seats that enacted these powers: priest, king and prophet. I mention this because one country after another has turned into this monsterous disease – it’s a political pandemic. The very media that was supposed to expose these problems failed the public and went so far left that any of their “repentant” attitudes in moving to the right are laughible at best and effigy worthy at least (and how many of us haven’t burned a paper at least once in our life – the only type of “book” burning that is not only common but humanitarian).

Rogue online papers, bloggers and videos are means of information, but every road of information quickly becomes saturated with misinformation so that only those who saw the events unfold personally can determine the truth. These people are fervently preaching, tirelessly running, actively working or jaded and drinking.

Excuse me while I look for the nearest bar…