Their doors are still open for business but their quality has left the building...
Earlier this month, I had attempted to visit a favorite restaurant in Lynden, WA and found that their hours had been greatly reduced. They dropped their dinner service and were only open until 4:00PM.
Part of my errands today were to Lynden so I figured, great, I will stop in at Dutch Mother's and get a late lunch/early dinner. I was there around 3:00PM.
I ordered my favorite - the Turkey Dinner - and was horribly disappointed. They used to serve real turkey breast meat with homemade gravy, dressing and some baby red spuds and green beans.
The only thing unchanged were the green beans, spuds and dressing. Everything else was franken-food.
The gravy was most definitely out of a Number 10 can - they probably spiked it up a bit with some seasoning or base but it was not made from scratch. The turkey meat was uniform thin slices - a bit thicker than commercially sliced deli meat but still, very uniform. The meat was piled up over the dressing and 'broken' up a bit but when I pieced some of it together, its original form was a circle about six inches in diameter.
This was not any natural kind of breast meat that I know of - this was a mechanically separated meat product (here and here) that had been extruded into a loaf. I could tell because there was no real grain or pattern of muscle fibers in the meat - it would pull apart along any axis. There were fibers present but none of them were longer than a half-inch or so. The taste was horrible.
When I went to the cashier to pay, they asked me how my meal was. I said that it was O.K. and they picked up on that immediately. She assured me that the turkey was roasted in their kitchen and the slices were uniform in size because they had a mechanical slicer and didn't carve by hand any more. I would hate to think that she was lying to my face so I will consider that the kitchen and the management was lying to her and she was only repeating what she was being told.
What really bakes my noodle is that they had the fscking gall to charge $18 for the meal...
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