Fits and Starts

It's been about a year since my last post, so I thought I should post that I've not given up...I haven't forsaken the blog. It is my sincere desire to carry on with the blog and continue posting, but frankly, there's not been that much to post about.

On the car front, I could go on about the electric vs. gas car battles or the economy's effects on car sales, but the news does a pretty good job with that. The one bright light on the car horizon is Fiat's overtaking of Daimler Chrysler, which brings the sexy little Fiat 500 to the 'States. I'll be writing about that in a future article. As for the Nissan Leaf vs. Chevy Volt battle, I think there is a clear and distinct winner, and I'll be covering that too, as well as looking at the newcomers to the race.

On the food front, I've not been doing a lot of cooking lately, so new discoveries or interesting mistakes haven't been happening in my kitchen. However, I have recently taken a part time job at Williams Sonoma at Crabtree Valley Mall and have discovered how much I LOVE high end gadgets! I get to play with them all I want AND I get to hear from the customers what works and what doesn't. So, I'll be sharing some of those product reviews as well.

Finally, I've had the chance to visit a number of the restaurants on the Victim List, as well as some not listed, and I'd like to write up those reviews. One not so surprising fatality in the past year is Bentley's, which used to be in front of Crossroads at Cary. It was a highly ambitious restaurant that started at the beginning of the market downturn. My husband and I had dinner there twice, and brunch with his mother once. My first impression was of the decor and layout of the restaurant. They pretended to be a "white tablecloth" restaurant, but the layout was much like an O'Charlie's with booths around the outside of a sunken dining room where there were more booths and then four-top tables in the center. Along the back wall was an open-kitchen concept where the kitchen activity could be seen yet the diners were separated from the noise by a glass wall. The decor itself was old-fashioned and done in the style of men's club library with everything painted in black, the booths were a dark leather, the lamps had green lampshades, the wood was stained a dark cherry. The worst part was that they seemed to have a lavatory plumbing problem. There was a distinct odor of sewerage gas coming from the vicinity of the lavatories. I don't know if this was ever repaired, but it did appear to have been an ongoing problem. By the stains on the dining room carpet had been overrun with water on a few occasions. And, who puts carpet in restaurants anymore anyway?? The food was ambitious but didn't live up to expectations, especially for the prices charged. In fact, it's difficult for me to remember much about the food there, yet I can remember quite easily the always good steak we get at Firebird's. It's no surprise that Bentley's has gone the way it has...people aren't looking to spend money on pretensions, however, we know good food when we have it and clearly Bentley's didn't. Au Revoir, Bentley's. May your reincarnation as an Asian Buffet find better success...and a repaired lavatory.