Today brings something new to The Fast Food Critic. First, we get to do a crossover with a TV Review I ran a few weeks back for America’s Next Great Restaurant, NBC’s reality competition to see who could make a restaurant that Chipotle founder, Judge, and uber bitch Steve Ells (who looks and acts like a cross between Tim Gunn, The Riddler, and Niles Crane) would eat at. Secondly, the food at Soul Daddy is actually healthy…and I mean that as an extreme insult as the food is also terrible.
I knew the four judges on America’s Next Top Restaurant would run Soul Daddy–a promising restaurant when the food had flavor and variety–into the ground. Primarily, because the show is called America’s Next Top Restaurant but only one judge is American (Bobby Flay), and the other three are Australian (Curtis Stone), Spanish (Lorena Garcia…pound for pound one of the dumbest people in reality TV, and that’s saying something), and Martian (Steve Ells). What we had is Bobby trying to be sensible and the other three out ruling him on making Soul Daddy “healthy” which is another way of saying “flavorless, dried trash that sits under heat lamps all day.”
I tried the New York location, which is advertised as “South Street Seaport” but actually is buried on the outskirts of it down an alley nobody walks through, sandwiched in-between urinating hobos and office buildings where nobody knows what the building does. Anyway, after you turn the corner to go down the rabbit hole, you enter Soul Daddy which looks like a post-apocalyptic Chipotle. Fans of the show will remember that the judges criticized the guy behind Soul Daddy for using a purple color scheme but that is infinitely better than the soulless industrial interior Soul Daddy currently has which is more fitting for a subway station than a restaurant (perhaps a sign the judges aren’t really committed to making this restaurant work? The show has already been cancelled).
Then you look at a menu, which includes only THREE meats (pork, ribs, or baked chicken) and eight sides, but the catch is that SEVEN of the sides are the same damn thing. They are all variations of salad, no macroni and cheese, no baked beans, nothing that would actually go well with the pork and ribs (where in the hell is Grill Billies when you need them?). There’s sweet potato salad, rice salad, black eyes peas salad, regular salad, etc. The only side not salad are these awful cheese grits. So I got a ribs plate–the ribs were sitting under a heat lamp for hours–which include four ribs with little meat, two sides, a biscuit you could break a window with, and sweet tea that tasted neither sweet nor like tea. Oh, and it only cost me a mere 15 bucks which is fucking outrageous. The one draw of being the fast food critic is that most of the things I review are cheap, but this was bullshit. I could have gotten infinitely better food for half the price at Boston Market and not needed a map to find that location.
While You’re Eating It: It’s best to smother everything in the one thing Soul Daddy has with flavor: The Bar-be-cue sauce. If you do that, it’s edible. If you don’t, you might as well be eating tofu and I feel like that was by the judges–who pushed healthy food–design.
After You’re Done: You feel like it would have been easier if you had lowered your pants so they could rape you on the price easier. Also, you feel angry that Soul Daddy–a restaurant I really liked over the horrifyingly bland Spice Coast in the competition–has been made into something you wouldn’t eat at twice. I actually wish the Brooklyn Meatball Company would have won.
Impotence Level: Not so bad, if being in a blind rage puts you in the mood. Since I’m not Bill O’Reilly, it doesn’t.
Heart Attack Level: 3 on a scale of 1 to 5. The reason I say two is because the anger you feel after eating there is just as bad as consuming a Big Mac. I think stress will kill me before a big plate of pork will.