Mimi’s Cafe in Arlington is an overly cute, overly ornate, and at least when I was there, over crowded place. That was strike one, there was no where for the twenty to thirty people to wait their twenty to thirty minutes for a table to open up. So the six of us stood around the bar and took in the odd mixture of doll house and French country estate that makes up the decor. I’m sure the place was designed to be cute and cozy, but it just ended up being loud and noisy. We tried to chat away the minutes, but it seemed a bit pointless after a while. So twenty to thirty minutes pass and we are seated, after having to tiptoe over the next group of customers that had nowhere to wait. Strike two, ten minutes pass and we are not served the famous bread plate until we are forced to stop someone passing by and ask for it. So we look over the menu, which does seem to have some pretty nice items on it. But wait, No Dr Pepper?!? Make that strike three.
A bartender comes over and says that the waiter is buried and can’t help us right now. He takes our drink order and confirms no Dr Pepper and no Mountain Dew, then leaves. A hostess comes by to drop off the drinks and take our food orders. I order a French Quarter hamburger, which sounds good, avocados, bacon, sourdough bread, half a pound of meat, and fries. The wife orders a Pesto Shrimp with Tomato Mozzarella Ravioli.
The waiter pops by and asks how we are doing, refills a couple of drinks, and promptly vanishes again.
After a while someone with a couple of trays comes to the table and doles out the food. This fellow was not our waiter. My sandwich and fries look ok, it is a lot of food. The wife’s food, however appears to be six ravioli and six shrimp artfully displayed on a very large plate that makes the meal look even smaller than it is. This was not what she expected, especially since it cost roughly twice as much as my hamburger.
Now I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you have eaten a hamburger at some point in your life. This is usually a bun, a slice of meat, a slice of cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, onion, some kind of dressing and the top of the bun. The entire point of a hamburger is that it can be eaten with two hands and an open mouth. Strike four, this burger was about seven inches tall and would not compress to a thickness that would allow me to take a bite. The sourdough garlic bread that sounded kind of cool on the menu was a disaster as a hamburger bun. I ended up eating the sloppy mess with a knife and fork. The fries were fine, but then, how bad do you have to be to screw up fries?
After the food is served our waiter makes a cameo appearance to ask if everything looks alright and is then off again. I think he may have come by one more time to drop off the check, which was just under a hundred dollars for the six of us. There are a lot of good restaurants in Arlington where we could have spent that hundred dollars.
This is a trendy place in a brand new shopping center, and we passed several other new restaurants on the way to Mimi’s spot in the far back corner. This is just another cookie cutter restaurant chain busy opening new shops in every city they can, whether they need to or not.
Next time we go to Highlands Mall to eat, we’ll be stopping at one of the other places.
Mimi’s Cafe-2 stars
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