Saturday, January 30, 2010

Extraordinary Desserts sucks

Today I also went to Extraordinary Desserts.

If you look up Extraordinary Desserts on yelp, you will notice that it will have four stars and this is probably because all the reviews were written by college kids and hipsters who have no idea what good cake is and associate price with quality.

When I entered Extraordinary Desserts, I was immediately struck by the decor. Everything was full of metal and glass, which immediately set off my bad food alarm. A personal bias, but whenever I see restaurant that is totally modern it is probably going to suck. I took a glance at the cakes only set off more alarms as I noted the enormous size of the slices and the thick icing and ganache that covered them. Then it dawned on me, this is just a hipper version of the Cheesecake Factory. I noted my observation to Ashley and her roommate Tiffany and after a few moments, they agreed. A scan around the rest of the restaurant revealed even another troubling observation! Everyone in the restaurant was young and dressed sharply, where are my old people that so often frequent my favorite cake shops? From the onset, things were not looking good.

We were seated and after quite a long wait, the waiter finally came to take our order. To my frustration Ashley and Tiffany ordered a brownie sundae, something that you can find anywhere, instead of the cake which I assume is what the place is known for. I ordered their Truff Framboise, a chocolate raspberry cake that looked the best out of all the ones. As expected, the slice of cake was huge and covered in a thick chocolate ganache. One bite was already enough for me. The sweetness and richness of the chocolate was overwhelming. The cake was incredibly dense, so dense in fact that I had trouble cutting the cake up into manageable pieces with my fork. In addition, the raspberry sauce covering the plate was also incredibly sweet and reminiscent of the kind that you buy in a bottle at the grocery store.

I have this theory that the more ingredients and flavors a food item has, the worse the quality of that food item. To better illustrate this concept of mine, imagine a Subway sandwich. Recall how Subway's meats and cheeses look like plastic and how their tomatoes are never fully red. Yet when Subway compiles all of the ingredients together, it makes a halfway decent sandwich. I believe that this is because you cannot taste each individual item. All the flavors just blend together and get lost, never allowing the diner to taste the lack of quality of each individual sandwich ingredient.

Tonight's desserts has been no exception to my theory, Extraordinary desserts' cakes are extremely complicated and ingredient heavy. You cannot get a simple cheesecake or chocolate cake there, every name of every dessert has to have extra adjectives in it to describe the large amount of ingredients stuffed into it. This is no doubt in order to hide their sub par ingredients and recipes.

Oh how I longed for the simple and delicate textures and flavors of Bijan's cakes tonight.

-muffinman

3 COMMENTS:

sarahyangg said...

hahahha
i agree, extraodinary is not very good

Life After ARC said...

yes sarah you have good taste :]

-muffinman

o.O said...

I never liked pastries in the first place--I say people try to make it too fancy and pretty looking where they forgot the quality of the taste of it. I know people who love that place and it just baffles me why they do.

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