STEPH DEROSA: KILL THE GIANT SALAD BOWLS. THEY'RE EMBARRASSING >>>

Johnny’s Dock Restaurant
Spinach Salad with Shrimp
Price: $14.50
Rating: Three and a half out of four croutons
 

Just ask anyone and they’ll tell you that Johnny’s Dock is a direct representation of classic, traditional Tacoma waterfront dining. For more than 50 years Johnny’s has presented itself in grandeur, welcomed boating guests, served up fine hospitality â€" and even finer seafood. I’ll go ahead and be honest with you about something: I had never been there before. Don’t hate me.
I had recently been told by more than a handful of people that Johnny’s Dock was somewhere I HAD to visit in order to experience real Tacoma seafood. I knew it was something I not only “had” to do, but something I wanted to do. So on a recent beautiful, sunny day, I planted myself next to a window overlooking the beauty of Tacoma’s docks â€" right there at Johnny’s Dock.

Description: Fresh spinach leaves, generous amounts of slivered almonds, bacon chunks, and hard-boiled egg pieces are tossed in Johnny’s very own creamy Jamaica Mistake dressing and held together in a deep glass bowl. Laying upon this mound of decadent, traditional spinach salad saladries (I just made that word up), came a weighted mass of bay shrimp and grated black rind Parmesan cheese. Next to my very own spinach salad kingdom lay the warm, soft garlic bread that I just couldn’t seem to get enough of.

Taste: This dish had everything I needed in spinach salad. There were plenty of garnishments and toppings to chew on in every bite

Conclusion: I loved the bowl. I was so happy to see a real salad bowl, nice and deep. Forget those wide, shallow bowls with the huge rim. All that is telling me is that you think I’m stupid, and I will be easily fooled into thinking the salad is bigger than it actually is. Those immense bowls are nothing but an optical illusion. Johnny’s genuinely cavernous salad bowl made scraping the sides easier, dishing the goods onto my fork simpler, and presented the meal in a model way that I think more restaurants should follow.

I’ll tell you something else, restaurants, when a woman orders a salad; she is saying she doesn’t want a gigantic meal. So when you bring out that enormous, oversized plate-looking thing you call a bowl, it’s doing nothing but embarrassing her. She obviously doesn’t want people thinking she’s a pig in the first place (hence her salad order), so why would you make the presentation so large and grand as you set the meal in front of her?

Dressing on the Side
My message to local evening news: Enough with the Swine Flu bullshit. Enough with how shitty the economy is, and most importantly, enough with the fake voice inflictions. So it’s a slow news day â€" that much is obvious. Obama’s been in office more than one hundred days, he bought a dog, and we all look forward to hearing about his daughters taking their first bong hit in college. I get it, bad news slow going in your line of work.

When you have to over-hype a common flu and scare families into retreating to their basement shelters (which were originally built to wait out the apocalypse) â€" that right there is telling me that you are ignorant. You obviously can’t scrape up enough creativity and intelligence to put together an evening program pointing out the good in our communities and the people that are thriving. Talk about the kids, talk about charities, talk about events, music, and success. I’m sick of all the negativity. Don’t glorify an illness for your own, greedy benefit of making it “breaking news”. I know it helps you feel the job security, but it makes everyone else want to puke.

Don’t drill into your viewer’s heads that the sky is falling, the economy sucks, and that we’re all going to lose our jobs and become street whores. THAT is what makes people stop spending. THAT is what kills the economy. I hate you, television news media. Go get a job that actually requires you to use your brain. Like chocolate pudding pop making. Now that’s some good shit. Pudding pops. Mmmmmm.

[Johnny’s Dock Restaurant, 1900 E. D St., Tacoma, 253.627.3186]