The List

Follow my progress on the spreadsheet HERE.


Sunday, April 24, 2011

#53 Bluestone


 Actually, Bluestone was quite good.  Which makes this review just a little less interesting.
The food is basically American, the type of stuff you’d expect at a bar/restaurant, but they do have a few more unique items on the menu that make it generally more interesting.  Pat got the “WICB” burger—a scale-tipping combo of guacamole, bacon, BBQ sauce, and Monterey Jack cheese, and I was totally impressed.  If I ever just give up and become a fat chick, I’d probably eat this at least twice a week.  Still holding on to my self-respect and some vestige of “healthy,” I went for the salmon wasabi ginger wrap, and was also totally impressed.  It was deliciously asian-inspired, and the salmon was nicely cooked and moist. Heh, moist.
Gotta love abstract art and tiny picture frames
Sadly, Bluestone didn’t accept my Restaurant.com gift certificate—they’re “in a dispute” with the website, and we paid full price for our dinner.  Being Ithaca, it was still only $40.

Friday, April 8, 2011

#52 Rulloff's: A journey into collegetown


The Story: Mr. Edward Rulloff, a genius philologist and sometime Ithaca resident in the mid-nineteenth century, was also a serial killer.  He killed his wife and daughter, among many others, dumped his victim’s bodies in Cayuga Lake and served parts of his sentences in the Ithaca jail.  He was finally caught in Binghamton and executed in the last public hanging in NY, in 1871.  A hundred years later, Rulloff’s Restaurant and Bar opened its doors in Collegetown.  Too soon?
Edward Rulloff: serial killer and master chef?

 Rulloff’s has been around since the 1970’s, faithfully dishing up hamburgers and cheese fries to drunk Cornell students.  They’re also known for their $2 pitchers of Rolling Rock.  It’s a classy establishment, to say the least.
I’ve been to the bar section of Rulloff’s many times with vet school friends, and for a while it was our class’s gathering place after momentous occasions like finishing Block 1 or Thursday, but until I started looking up all the restaurants in Ithaca I didn’t realize they served food.  I sort of wish I had never had to find out.
I most recently dined at Rulloff’s a few nights ago, when some friends and I went for an early beer and I hadn’t yet eaten dinner.  It was the perfect opportunity to try a new restaurant, and on a positive note, the kitchen was open until 10 pm.  But that’s about where the positives ended.  I ordered a turkey sandwich with onion rings for the table, and a Magic Hat.  They hit the mark with the beer, but you’d think after ordering a turkey sandwich I would have gotten a turkey sandwich.  What did I actually get?  A cheeseburger.
Okay, so the waiter/bartender wasn’t so good at understanding the words “turkey sandwich.” But that wouldn’t have been such a problem if they had just decided that I didn’t want the turkey sandwich because of how amazingly delicious the hamburgers were.  Actually what it tasted like was that the kitchen was closed, and the only thing they could find lying around was a three day old cheeseburger they stole from the nearby Cornell dining hall.  Sadly, I ate almost all of it, because by the time they actually brought out my meal the bar was so packed with undergrads that it was impossible to even make it up there to let them know that a cheeseburger is NOT a turkey sandwich. 
Wilder Brain Collection (thanks cornell.edu)
Edward Rulloff persists on, and not only through his eponymous restaurant.  His brain is on display in Uris Hall, right here on campus, as part of the Wilder Brain Collection.  And I bet it would taste better than that cheeseburger.