Thursday, January 08, 2004

Emeril's Not So Tasty the Second Time

The culinary delicacies of Emeril's at Universal Citywalk in Orlando leave something to be desired on their second tasting, claims Wade Billick, 26.

Billick ate lunch at the upscale restaurant, located a short walk from the Islands of Adventure theme park, on Tuesday. After lunch, he walked into the amusement park and commenced riding several different attractions.

"I personally feel Emeril's is highly overrated as a restaurant," said Billick. "Initially, I confess I was pleased. I had a tasty rock shrimp-stuffed snapper in butter sauce and stuffed morels with crawfish. And I sampled some of [my boyfriend] Steve's pan-seared squab with orange-cranberry chutney. Very tasty. Plenty to eat, and some unusual flavors. It did indeed seem to be kicked up to notches unknown to mankind."

Billick's positive first reaction changed after he entered the park, however. "Steve and I went straight for Hulk," he said. "There wasn't much of a line, so we rode that like 10 times in a row, then we did the Fire Dragon six or seven times, and then we had an informal takeover of the Storm Force Acceletron. I bet we were on that sucker for almost 30 minutes straight, whipping around in little circles over and over again. It was around that point that I realized Emeril's wasn't treating me too well."

According to Billick, "my previous good feelings of the restaurant evaporated as soon as I started violently evacuating all the contents of my stomach onto the pavement and benches, accompanying the purge with tremendous squooshing sounds and plenty of retching. I must say that the rock shrimp-stuffed snapper in butter sauce certainly did not have a remotely pleasant flavor by this point, and the stuffed morels would definitely have benefitted from not being coated in gallons of my own fetid bile."

He added, "that squab also failed to impress, as it left a greasy residue and not-so-fresh aroma on its way from my gullet to the tops of Steve's shoes."

"Save your money and skip Emeril's," added Billick. "If you're going to be tasting voluminous piles of semi-digested food as they spray back out your throat, you might as well have it be Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville. That way the stuff spurting out has essentially the same flavor and consistency as anything you consume in the first place, so you won't be disappointed when the food slips so much in quality the second time around, like at Emeril's."

--JCK

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