Taste Test: Tender Greens at The Irvine Spectrum
Categories: Now Open, Taste Test
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| Edwin Goei |
Tender Greens opened its first OC outlet this weekend at the Irvine Spectrum. For those of you who have not tried the L.A. or San Diego branches, here's a quick "Taste Test" review.
In a word: good.
In nine words: better than I thought a salad-centric restaurant could be.
What surprised me most wasn't actually the salads, but everything else that wasn't a "tender green." The shredded chicken in the Chinese chicken salad didn't actually have the texture of burlap that I expected; instead it was moist as if it had just been stripped from a freshly roasted hen.
The Cowboy Cookies are excellent--an amalgam of oatmeal and chocolate chip that easily bests Doubletree's. The cobbler was served heated with a granulated-sugar encrusted dome that crumbled into its ramekin of apples sliced with care.
The fried chicken in the fried chicken salad seems to be battered in-house. In the $11 salad, there were two boneless planks, one white meat, the other dark, both inexplicably juicy, delicate, despite being kept under heat lamps.
But perhaps the best thing I had were the mashed potatoes that were the side on a "hot plate" of grilled albacore tuna. I asked one of the workers how they made it and he went into a near three-minute soliloquy on how they boiled the potatoes just to the point of tenderness, salting the water, taste-testing, pouring out the excess liquid before adding cream, butter and creme fraiche.
And there's this: they serve agua frescas. Only one flavor per night, but still, they were legitimate and as surprisingly refreshing as the whole entire outfit turned out to be.
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