We have come to the point where when a restaurant actually
delivers on what it promises, I get excited.
Finally, in a little corner of the world, there are places that restore
your faith in restaurant humanity.
Witness, the Horseshoe Pub in that bastion of fine dining…Hudson,
Massachusetts.
Everyone knows what to expect at a “pub”…beers and burgers,
or something like that. When I go to a
place like this, I’m not going to order the sushi special, because that
certainly will be “special”; you have to stay in the place’s wheelhouse. Order a beer, get some wings, grab a burger,
and enjoy. In today’s world, though,
sometimes you still have to hope for the best, but expect the worst. Thankfully, the Horseshoe Pub delivered…in
spades!
The Horseshoe Pub is located on a side street in downtown
Hudson…you almost need to know someone who can tell where to find this
place. However, once you do, you’ll find
plenty of free parking.
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| Double-baked goodness |
My meal started with a double order of “double baked”
Buffalo wings. “Double baked” is a bit
of a misnomer-we asked the waitress, and she explained that the wings are
flash-fried, then coated in the choice of sauce, then baked to cook the flavor
into the wings; conclusion-evil genius!
Without a doubt, these could rank as my second favorite wings (the spicy
wings at Sichuan Gourmet could still be in the lead, but it’s close). I’ve had wings at all the big places,
including the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, NY, but baking in the oven, roasting the
flavor right into the wings, brought these meaty wings to an entirely new
level…I am salivating just writing this.
Everyone has some food they crave…some like
sweets/chocolate/candy, others, like me, crave salty foods. Every now and then, some food passes across a
person’s plate and like a siren’s song, calls their name-these tantalizing
little wings keep calling me back to Hudson!
It’s like crystal meth on a chicken bone! Thankfully, my teeth won’t rot from these.
After the wings, I washed it down with a half-pound
cheeseburger, with mushrooms and sautéed onions with American cheese and a side
of onion rings (my mother’s phone call to lecture me comes in 5, 4, 3,
2…). The burger was ample, cooked
perfectly, and had a nice balance of the additional toppings. My only complaint, and it minor, is that the
roll the burger is served on was a common, Sysco roll. I can find that roll in just about any other
place. I might suggest an onion roll, or
a fresh bulkie roll, but I’m not marking them down for this…the roll was fine,
just common.
What really grabbed me on this were the onion rings. Just about every pub tells you they serve
“hand cut” onion rings. What they don’t
tell you is that the cutting is done in some warehouse and by “hand”, they mean
a machine operated by someone’s hand.
It’s the same with “hand cut French fries”. Mostly that means someone putting a potato
into some sort of press, and pulling a lever.
Sure, the lever is operated by hand, but if you think there’s some guy
with a sharp knife meticulously cutting potatoes, or onions…well…
But while these onions rings may have been cut somewhere
else, there was some onion voodoo going on in the kitchen, just without the
chicken blood. These rings were not your
common breaded rings…they had a texture and taste that was just plain
exceptional. And, like the “Matt
Garrett’s” of old, reminded me in some ways of the “onion loaf” the way they
were stuck together and had to be pulled/cut apart.
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| Onion loaf!!! |
For those of you unfamiliar, “Matt Garrett’s” was a small
local chain that hit it’s stride in the early 80s in the Greater Boston area,
with locations, among others, in Sudbury, Brookline, Brockton…one of their
featured appetizers was the “onion loaf”.
A greater, and more deadly, food invention there never was, except for
the “Bloomin’ Onion”. It was basically a
brick-sized and shaped fried onion loaf and it weighed about as much as a brick
too! It was so ridiculously dense that
you couldn’t really pull it apart until the end…when it was delivered to the
table, you needed to slice it with a serrated knife! Basically, fried onion loaf slices!!! I’m thinking they should have used these
slices in place of sandwich bread, and stuffed some meat in between. Can you imagine…a burger served between two
onion loaf slices!?!?!? OMG, I am starting
to sweat just thinking about eating this.
But, for one brief moment last night, the onion rings at the Horseshoe
Pub brought me back…and gave me chest pains.
Onion rings never hurt so good.
BTW, the salads looked good too.
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| Grilled steak salad |
Now I know that even a blind chicken gets some grain now and
then, and places can be “on” or “off” on any given night (as “yelp.com” will
surely inform), but I am happy that I was there on an “on” night, and I look
forward to adding this to my select group of places to where I’ll return, if
they execute the second experience as well as the first. For now, I encourage you all to try and find
this place. The décor is nothing
special, the location is totally off the beaten path, and the food is not
fancy. But it was well prepared, well
executed, and well received. Go forth,
into the land, and eat!
