Every time I write a blog post it’s either about a crazy creation I made at home or something delicious I ate at a restaurant. Well, today’s story is a little different. This one is about a meal that totally let me down.

A couple weeks back my wife and I went to a Milwaukee Brewers baseball game with our friends Tom and Stephanie. Once inside the stadium we headed to the Johnson Controls Stadium Club where I noticed that they’ve added some new items to their menu since last year. One of them — the Brewers Brat Dog — caught my eye.

The menu described it as a “bacon wrapped, hot dog stuffed bratwurst with grilled onion and Cheddar cheese served on a pretzel hoagie.” Actually, they described it a little differently, but that was due to the fact that whoever put the menu together apparently never learned how to spell the word “served.” The randomly capitalized words and haphazard use of the space bar was also a nice touch, but who cares about all that because I was getting a hot dog… wrapped in bacon… stuffed INSIDE a bratwurst!

About fifteen minutes after placing my order our waitress arrived with my Brewers Brat Dog. My first thought when looking at it was that they had to have mixed up my order and served me the wrong thing. The pretzel bun, hot dog, bacon, cheese and onions were all there, but the hot dog certainly wasn’t stuff inside a bratwurst.

I actually didn’t see any brat at all until I noticed that it was cut in half and placed underneath the hot dog. Since when does putting one thing on top of another thing count as stuffing it?  Also, check out how small the bratwurst is. Oh, you can barely see it in the photos? That’s because it’s the smallest brat in the entire world! I wasn’t even aware that they made them that tiny.

I know that food at sporting events is always priced a little high, but at $12 for a burnt hot dog, a miniscule amount of bacon, the tiniest brat of all time and some cheese that was obviously melted in a microwave it honestly doesn’t get any worse than this. What a rip off….

I used to live fairly close to the Painted Parrot, and when I did I stopped in there on a pretty regular basis. They used to have an eating challenge where if you could finish a two pound burger, two ounces of soup and 22 fries in 22 minutes or less you’d win a free quarter barrel of beer. I always meant to try it, but never got around to it.

The bar is under under new ownership now and unfortunately they don’t offer that challenge anymore, but they do have a revamped menu that has a pretty amazing new burger on it.

No, the burger patty isn’t two pounds, which I imagine would make for a really dry burger anyway, but it is battered and deep fried! It actually tasted exactly like the same type of breading they use on their onion rings, which are pretty delicious in their own right. Add in the sweet potato fries that I chose as my side and I was pretty much in heaven!

Oh yeah, and if you like nachos you need to try Painted Parrot’s “Big Ass Nachos.” Be sure to bring a few friends with to help you finish them though, because they’re ridiculously huge. They actually come served on an upside down garbage can lid. Yeah… a garbage can lid….

I’m always a fan of any restaurant that serves breakfast all day long, so when I heard that a new place named Cafe Agora opened near my work and that they just happened to serve my favorite meal of the day from open to close I decided to stop in and check them out.

The cafe refers to themselves as a “pancake house,” which is sort of weird to me because their menu only includes five different varieties of pancakes, yet they offer six different types of crepes, eight different omelets and six different takes on one of my favorite breakfast dishes — Eggs Benedict. They even have just as many waffle and French toast offerings as they do pancakes.

I wasn’t planning on ordering pancakes anyway, so it really doesn’t matter to me how many, or how few, they offer, but it just seems like if you’re going to call yourselves a “pancake house” that you should have a LOT more than five different types of pancakes.

When it came time to order I decided to try the Mon Amour Benedict, which the menu described as two croissant halves, layered with grilled portabella mushrooms, sliced tomatoes and melted Swiss cheese and topped with poached eggs and Hollandaise sauce.

When the waitress returned fifteen minutes later with my food food the first thing I could think of was that it’s a good thing I love Hollandaise sauce as much as I do because my food was absolutely drenched in it! It looked like the cook just took two giant soup ladles of sauce and covered my entire plate with it.

To be fair, the dill flavored, housemade Hollandaise sauce that they use is really good, it’s just that I actually like to be able to taste all the different food on my plate. With the Mon Amour Benedict all I could really taste was sauce.

By the time I was done eating, and I’m a really quick eater, everything was just completely soggy because all it had been doing the entire time it was on my plate was soaking up sauce.

Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed my meal, but if Cafe Agora would just go a little easier on the Hollandaise sauce my food would have been perfect. Actually, who am I kidding? They need to go a LOT easier on the sauce….