Always beware the restaurant with a major gimmick. It's a sure sign that the food alone isn't good enough to carry the place.
The Lone Star, the local branch of a national chain, has not one but two major gimmicks, which are both more than a little annoying. If the gimmicks are wanting, you know there's little hope for the food.The first gimmick is the charming practice of throwing your peanut shells on the wooden floor. While you wait for a table, you're served peanuts in a bucket, then encouraged to drop their casks wherever you happen to be standing. There's nothing quite so appetizing as the crunch, crackle and squish of a debris-strewn floor as you make your way to your table.
The second gimmick happens every hour on the hour when the omnipresent country music is cranked up to ear-splitting levels, and servers assemble in the aisles between the tables to do a very bored rendition of "The Boot Scootin' Boogie." It actually seemed a little dangerous to me, what with all those peanut shells on the floor.
The help capsizing into my lap turned out to be the least of my worries, however. Perhaps they just had a bad food night, as the manager assured me, but everyone in my dining party agreed that it was one of the least exceptional meals they'd ever ordered. Everything went so abysmally, in fact, that the server, who made four major mistakes, changed her name midway through the meal.
"What did you say your name was again?" one of my dining companions asked. "It's Martha," she replied with a laugh, after confusing my order with someone else's. She'd previously told us her name was Amy. At least she was good natured about it.
The manager was good-natured too, considering he was very willing to exchange a distinctly old and unhealthy piece of salmon for a fresher portion. He even offered to strike my "filet mignon" from the bill when we discovered it consisted of three grainy, inferior cuts of sirloin held together with a wooden pick, then wrapped with charred bacon. "Sometimes they do that in the kitchen when they don't have enough 9-ounce filets," the manager told me. "But they shouldn't. If it ever happens again, you just send it right back."
I feel extremely confident it will never happen again, at least not to me.
Judging from the line outside on a Friday night, however, there are a lot of people who truly like the Lone Star. It's very familyfriendly, partially because of its busy interior. There are numerous distractions for the children, and if they act up, other diners won't be able to hear them over the noise.
It's definitely not a bargain though. Dinners run from $10.45 for a San Antonio Sirloin to $17.95 for the 20-ounce T-bone.
Although they come with a large iceberg lettuce dinner salad, a small loaf of bread and your choice of Texas rice, steak fries, baked potato or baked sweet potato, the quality of the food is inferior to a number of other more prominent and less-expensive chain steak houses that also offer an extensive salad bar.
If that baked sweet potato sounds intriguing to you, as it did to us, beware another gimmick. It's a giant baked orange tuber, sliced open and inundated with what seemed like half a cup of brown sugar and cinnamon. It could easily beat out the textureless cobbler offered for dessert, at $2.95.
We did, however, experience one decent cut. It was the flavorful and juicy 16-ounce Texas Rib eye, for $15.95. But that couldn't quite make up for the rubbery shrimp, the meatless ribs or the aforementioned "filet mignon" or salmon. And the "Texas Tumbleweed," a battered and fried onion flower appetizer, looked good although it was served in a large puddle of grease and positively radiated sodium, obscuring any other flavor.
I'm not in the habit of criticizing a restaurant so thoroughly, but any cuisine that literally sends a party racing to the car for Rolaids desperately needs help. I'm not exaggerating - we were taking tablets right outside in the parking lot.
I'm sincerely sorry for the indigestion this review is sure to cause the management, but then again, what goes around comes around. What other rating could I possibly give this restaurant than - you guessed it - a lone star?
Rating: *
Lone Star Steakhouse and Saloon, 7176 S. 900 East, Midvale, UT 84047. (801) 568-2600. Open Sunday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., and until 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Checks and major credit cards accepted. Reservations not accepted.