Need proof of the food and portion size superiority?

On the left, half a Chili's tuna steak sandwich.

On the right, half of a Claim Jumper Honey Brie Chicken sandwich.

Both meals cost about $9.

Malaya and I first visited Claim Jumper on Valentine's Day, 2004, and loved it immediately. We returned about twice a month for several months, long enough to find our favorites from the menu. (Tuna salad sandwich or braised lamb shank for her, Honey Brie or BBQ Chicken sandwich for me.) It's actually pretty economical, since while their average entree runs a few bucks higher than equivalent food costs at Chili's, Applebee's, TGIF's, etc, the Claim Jumper version tastes better, and is like double the size. If $10 for a sandwich and onion rings seems steep, consider that there's no way on earth you're going to eat the entire thing in one sitting, and that just half of most Claim Jumper sandwiches are as big as a whole sandwich from most other places. Hell, a big CJ's sandwich is probably triple the size of a Big Mac or Spicy Chicken Sandwich or other large fast food burger.

Unfortunately, the very size and flavorful-ness of CJ's food is its downfall, if you're trying to lose weight and eat healthy, which is why Malaya and I are greatly limiting our CJ's visits post-MC fast.

Still, I highly recommend the food if you can handle the calories and fat. Get there early though; there's an hour wait by 6pm most nights, and if it's a weekend you can count on 2+ hours by 7pm.

February 17, 2004

Our first CJ visit ever.

Our first restaurant of choice, picked from our Entertainment book, seemed to have been torn down, or vanished into thin air, or else was practicing some sort of "find us if you can" decorating scheme, since we drove down the street twice, once in each direction, and never did see it.  So we said hell with it, and decided to just head to Claim Jumper, where we'd been planning on heading for dessert.  Neither of us had ever been there before, or ever had any interest in the restaurant, but recently on the Food Network we saw the end of a program that covered the top ten dessert cakes on earth, or top ten chocolate cakes, or something like that.  I wasn't paying much attention.  However one thing I did remember, and Malaya damn sure burned to her permanent disk storage, was that the Claim Jumper Motherlode chocolate cake was #1.

We arrived at Claim Jumper a bit before 5, figuring we'd eat early since we'd gotten up around noon and hadn't had anything more than a small snack before leaving the house. Not early enough, apparently, since when we got there we winced at the huge crowd sitting around outside, and the entirely full parking lot. The mini mall we went to had a Benihana and a couple of other restaurants, and they were all solid packed full as well.  I suppose they'd all be full on a Saturday night, or a holiday that people eat out on (such as Valentine's Day) but when you put those two things together... 2 to 2.5 hour wait at Claim Jumper.

We weren't starving though, and there were other things in the mall we could go look at, so we put our names down and wandered off.  Personally, I figured it would be 1.5 hours or so tops; that 1/4 of the people on the list ahead of us would give up on the wait and go somewhere else.

So we wandered around and went into Cost Plus, and CompUSA, and a giant discount bookstore that had Malaya making small noises in her throat.  And by the time we walked back to check up at Claim Jumper, it was nearly 6:30 and they said... we had over an hour yet to wait, and that we should be seated around 7:45.

So we headed back to the bookstore and browsed some more, and I read the first chapter of half a dozen novels (most were dreck) and bought the last book in the Wheel of Time series since I had only gotten it from the library before, and they were selling a brand new hardcover with a sliced cover over the spine (obviously from a box cutter when they opened the carton up) for $2.50.  They had perfect condition ones for $7, and that was about the average price of a book there.  I didn't see any brand new bestsellers, but they had literally thousands of recent titles, most hardcover and brand new, and all for about $7. Dumping excess stock left over from Xmas from numerous area bookstores, I assumed.

We returned to Claim Jumper around 7:30, and finally at 7:50 they seated us.  We'd never eaten there before and had no idea what to expect, but it wasn't bad. I had the idea it was sort of a lower-class steakhouse, like a cheaper Black Angus.  Not quite. It was more like a high-class Chili's or TGIF, with a more sit down vibe. Priced slightly higher, but not bad, and lots of variety.  Steaks, burgers, chicken, fish, shrimp, vegetarian options, salad bar with a lot of fruit, etc.  I'd recommend it; just not on a holiday.

We got a spicy shrimp taquito sort of appetizer that ran us $10, Malaya got a strawberry daiquiri that I sipped generously from, her entree was chicken fried chicken with biscuits and a side bowl of clam chowder, and I got the BBQ Chicken sandwich with steak fries and a side salad.  The appetizers came quite quickly, shuttled out by someone other than our waitress, the soup and salad were close on their heels, and before we had finished those the entrees arrived.  I was impressed by the kitchen speed; it obviously wasn't their fault that the wait was so long.

The food was pretty good, and the portions were huge!  I'm talking gigantic.  We hadn't eaten in like 8 hours by the time we got our food there, the appetiser wasn't that big, and I didn't finish even half my sandwich, which is very rare for me.  We're both pretty good and not eating for hours in advance of dinner, and then stuffing it all down, followed by not eating again for hours after that.  I hadn't taken anything home in a doggy bag for weeks and weeks, and I took about 2/3 of my sandwich that day, plus a bunch of fries, and Malaya had some chicken left, all of her mashed potatoes, and one of her two biscuits.  And I must say, they were the biggest biscuits I've ever seen.  Like the size of a cereal bowl each.

I took some photos of the left over food when we got home, along with a bunch more shots of the super chicken taquito/shrimp/bean burritos I talked about last week, so there will be food photos in the immediate future.  I'm just not in the mood to pull the shots off of the camera and sort and crop and all of that just yet.

And of course we followed up the meal with the gigantic motherlode cake.  We didn't eat any there, since the waitress brought it to us in the box and it was all wrapped up in waxed paper and we didn't want to bother opening it up there, as full as we were.  However once we got home and had some more room in our bellies a couple of hours later, we dug in.  And it's damn good.  I'm very sensitive to cake that's too sweet, or too covered in bad, foam-like icing, and their cake was neither of those.  I'd still have liked less icing and more nuts, but I feel that way about basically every cake I've ever had in my life, so don't pin too much on my opinion.

The total bill for dinner was over $60, which is high for two people at a medium-end restaurant, but you have to factor in the appetizer, bonus salad and soup, one strawberry daiquiri, and then $8 for dessert.  With tip it ran us $70, but we split it so that's not too huge an expense. And actually, considering that Malaya prevented me from blowing $25 on chocolate and $20 on flowers, I probably came out ahead, at least in terms of lasting value, since Anthropologist Bunny will be here forever.  Or at least a lot longer than flowers and chocolates would have lasted.

March 5, 2004

Malaya and me paid our 3rd visit to Claim Jumper restaurant on Thursday evening, and for the first time I left less than satisfied, and with no doggy bag. On my first two visits I got the BBQ chicken sandwich, and then the Honey brie chicken sandwich, and enjoyed them both.  Both also came on a bun the size of a personal pizza, and were so large that I was only able to eat half a sandwich once, and about 40% the other time. Hence the doggy bag, which is fine with me since I like leftovers for a later snack, and I like getting two meals out of one dinner.

On this third visit I wanted to try something different, so I got the grilled portabella mushroom sandwich, with some reservations.  I like portabellas, especially grilled, though I generally cut them into strips if I'm cooking, and serve them Philly Cheesecake/fajita style. I wanted another gargantuan sandwich though, and didn't know if it was just one mushroom patty, or several, or strips, or what.  So I asked the waiters.  Yes, "waiters."

This was a somewhat eerie innovation we were faced with on Thursday evening at Claim Jumper; they had waiters working in teams. We had a tall, large, unattractive woman, and a shorter, equally-unattractive man waiting on us, standing side by side, both writing down the order, and tag-teaming when they talked. I assumed one was the trainee and the other the trainer, and I guess that's an okay way to get a new employee up to speed; it's just not one I've ever before seen in a restaurant. I wouldn't have expected to see it first at Claim Jumper either; it's not like they're serving 6 daily specials with various exotic ingredients that most people need a dictionary and a search engine to research.

Anyway, as far as I could tell, the tall unattractive woman was the experienced waitress, since she seemed to take final say in most matters, and it was she who launched into a description of what my portabella burger was going to look like.  Perhaps she should have been trainee'ing under someone else though, since my question was partially "What's it like?" but mostly "Is it as huge as the other sandwiches?"

She said something about how they're very large to start off with but the cooking shrinks them up some, which while true was very far from a useful answer to my question.  I was too hungry to worry about it though, and talking to two of them at once creeped me out, so I just said, "Okay." and ordered that. I was also annoyed that they didn't have any soda I wanted. They charge $2.25 for a drink, and for that price I want something I like a lot, and that I can be sure to drink at least three refills of, or I feel ripped off. Even though Malaya was paying for dinner.

Unfortunately, Claim Jumper only stocks Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, and Mr. Pibb.  I don't like Coke, I hate Diet Coke, Sprite isn't a real soda, and Mr. Pibb is the poor man's Dr. Pepper, and is basically undrinkable. So I settled for water, only to realize, fifteen minutes later after browsing through the entire paperback-thick drinks/desserts/appetizers menu, that they actually had Barq's root beer from the fountain, I.E. with free refills, rather than just the obscenely overpriced at $2.50 IBC root beer, in the small 12oz bottle.  I like root beer, and while it lacks caffeine, putting it on the border of "real soda", it at least has artificial coloration, which keeps it on the safe side, and separates it from water look-alike things such as Sprite.

Malaya ordered some sort of cheddar cheese potato soup in a sourdough bowl, and also some chicken strips as an appetizer.

We've learned, during our first two visits, that one orders appetizers at Claim Jumper with caution.  They're expensive, as much as some of the entrees, but the money is well spent, since they're likely to be as large as your entire dinner entree.  In this case we got our chicken strips after a substantial wait (the restaurant was packed, with a 25 minute wait to be seated) and they were huge.  Seven strips, battered with BBQ sauce, and all of them were at least eight inches long.  They had to be breast meat, and damn near an entire breast each, they were so large.  Like small ears of corn on the cob.  Remember that later, when I get to the "when we got home" part of this tale.

We ate one each, split a third, and ended up nibbling a couple of bites each off of a fourth and fifth when our entrees were still not there.  Our thought immediately was to save some of the chickens for later snacking, like a sandwich the next day.  I'm now thinking about a chicken soft taco, with the chicken basically subbing for the usual chicken taquito I put into the super burritos.

When the food finally came, I had a decent-looking portabella sandwich, but one that wouldn't have looked out of place at Chili's, or Denny's, or a fast food restaurant. Oh it was pretty big, but I had no problem eating the whole thing and almost all of my fries, while as I said earlier, I couldn't manage even half of the two chicken sandwiches I'd tried previously.  My second mistake of the evening was the type of French fries I ordered, since I tried the string fries, rather than going with the much thicker steak-cut type I'd had the first two times.

Like Chili's (and other restaurants, as far as I know) Claim Jumper happened upon some sort of market research that said the main eater-reported problem with French fries is that they're not salty or peppery enough. They've taken bold steps to counter that failing, and you get about half a bottle of rock salt on a typical order of fries there, along with plenty of big chunks of pepper.  Since I never add salt to anything, and certainly not French fries when we wok fry some up here, I would be happy with plain potatoes, or perhaps ones that were very lightly salted.  Pepper would be fine also.

These were not lightly salted.  They weren't even heavily salted.  They were salt licks. We're talking hypertension au gratin.  I had to eat them with bites of my sandwich to keep my tongue from puckering up and shriveling away.

The other problem was the sandwich.  It wasn't gigantic, and it wasn't especially good.  The preparation looked fine; it had mixed salad greens with lots of the little purple things like arugula and such, a sour cream type of spread, purple onions, and more. The bread even looked nice; sort of yellowish and very rough and crunchy, like the sides of a grilled cheese sandwich on very hearty bread.  The problem was that they evidently accomplished that with about half a stick of butter, since it was just cloying in the mouth. The very buttery bread, combined with the thick cream cheese topping made the whole thing too pungent.  I never thought I'd complain about a sandwich that it had too much flavor, but here I am, and that's my complaint.  The sandwich combined with the super salty fries made the whole thing feel rather unhealthy, almost like extended dessert rather than dinner.

Malaya seemed to like her soup and bread, at least, and she ended up eating most of the sourdough bowl after the cleaned out the soup, so it must have been pretty okay. She also managed to save room for dessert, and we got a brownie to go, and were frightened by the weight of it when it arrived all wrapped up in a brown paper bag.  I opened it while Malaya was filling out the credit card receipt, wanting to see if they'd given us a brick by accident, and we took a look and giggled and saved it for home.

It came in a clear plastic box, a box that's easily large enough to hold a Big Mac. With some room to spare for fries.  Looking at it now, the brownie is about 5x5x3 inches.  2.54 it if you want the cm conversion.  It's ridiculously large, smeared with half inch of thick icing, studded with chocolate chips, and covered in sprinkled walnuts.  We sat on the couch at home, watching Survivor on tape, and ate about 1/6th of it, and Malaya did the last half of that herself after the thickness and richness of the chocolate satisfied my Y-chromosome-impaired sweet tooth in about 3 bites.

Overall it wasn't a bad dinner, but I can't recommend the portabella mushroom sandwich at Claim Jumper.

The other oddness of the dinner occurred in the car on the way there, when we found ourselves, as usual, singing that Fat Bastard catchy, "Chiiiiiii-leeesssss, baby back ribs! I want my Chiiiiiiiiii-leeeeeeesssssssss baby back ribs..." song, and I reflected how I've never seen any sort of advertising for Claim Jumper.  Not on the radio, in the paper or magazines, or on TV.  Malaya didn't recall seeing any either, and I speculated on what sort of catchy jingle they could possibly use to integrate themselves permanently into the collective catchy song unconscious of the American public.

Writing your own catchy song is damn near impossible, which is why it's always more economical to license an existing one, and mutilate the lyrics to your own purposes.  The three most catchy, quick songs I know of are all Weebl's Stuff ones, Kenya, Badgers, and Scampi.  So my thought was to use one or all of those for Claim Jumper, and just change the words. I shan't bore you with the full details, at least not until I have a microphone and so little self consciousness that I'd let my singing/chanting voice be heard online. But I think the best option is to go with the tune to Scampi, mostly since the lyrics can so easily be adapted to restaurant promotion.

"I've seen them, I've seen Claim Jumper fries.
I've been there, the food's a big surprise, like burgers, pasta, rum shots, pizza, daiquiris, brownies, beef ribs, tri tip, meatloaf, muffins, Motherload cake, nachos, turkey stack, Motherload cake!

--- repeat ---

There are ten items before the "motherload cake" refrain, then two more before the repeat of it, and then the whole thing loops.  I'm not getting paid as an ad agency to pour over the menu and find 10 things that match the song's rhythm and have the correct number of syllables, but it shouldn't be at all difficult to do, given the amount of things on the Claim Jumper menu.

I'd do it now, but my legs are sore from the 6 mile jog I endured over very hilly terrain Thursday afternoon, and as is well known, a sore left hip impairs lyrical rhythm.

March 6, 2004

When writing about the Claim Jumper foolishness yesterday, I forgot to return to a point I teased midway through.  I'd never have remembered, if not for Malaya poking me about it.

I said:

Seven strips, battered with BBQ sauce, and all of them were at least eight inches long. They had to be breast meat, and damn near an entire breast each, they were so large. Like small ears of corn on the cob. Remember that later, when I get to the "when we got home" part of this tale.

What I was going to say, was that we got home with them in a styrofoam container, which we left on the kitchen counter.  I went and hopped in the tub since my legs were sore from the long jog, and Malaya was working on things in the living room.  About 20 minutes into my bath she began yelling and cursing in frustration, but wouldn't say why. Some time later she came into the bathroom and told me what had happened.

She'd left the box open on the counter, where no kitties are allowed to go.  Jinxie had gotten up there, and silently and stealthily picked up one of the chicken strips, leaped down with it, and carried it into the living room under my desk, where she began to devour it with great gusto and delight.  Malaya did not detect her activities until she had put a substantial dent into the chicken piece.

The amusing part is the size of the chicken.  As I said, they were huge strips, half a foot at least, and quite thick.  When eating them, we were cutting them into 4 of 5 segments, and each one of those was a two-bite affair, if we wanted to be neat and civilized, rather than just stuffing huge chunks of flesh into our mouths.  Jinx is growing and she's quite fierce, but still, she had to look like a dog carrying a baseball bat when she had the chicken strip in her jaws.

And once she was on the floor eating it, Dusty finally noticed it and came hesitantly crowding in for his share.  We always figure if there were enough food here for just one cat, Dusty would die in about a week.

March 9, 2004

I've blogged a few times recently about Claim Jumper, and the obscene portion size. Here are a couple of examples of the leftovers.

This is what we brought home, after eating there the first time, on Valentine's Day, when we had to wait 3 hours for a table. These trays are the size of dinner plates, mine is the large sandwich with the fries, that's their BBQ chicken sandwich.  Half of it.  Malaya had one biscuit left over, along with her mashed potatoes.  The biscuit is a two-hander.  But of course your eyes are probably on the pie.  That's a slice of the six-layer Motherlode cake, and yes, they have special long rectangular boxes to carry it home in. It took us several days to eat, not because we couldn't eat it all at once, but because it was so good that we wanted to save it and enjoy it for longer.  That and we couldn't forget that it was about 120 calories per bite, and was single-handedly destroying our diet efforts.

Their brownies are basically the size of an extra large, square sandwich.  Larger than sandwich bread.  We wondered how they got it out of the pan, and into the to-go box, since there weren't any smears of chocolate on the sides, and the brownie wasn't smushed on any side or corner either. Do they have some sort of magical crane claw spatula that scoops it up from above and lowers it into the to-go box without losing a crumb? Or just waiters with very practiced and talented hands?

We have no idea about the calories in the brownie, and honestly, we don't want to know.  We've been eating about a fifth of it each day since we got it, and it's still sitting in the fridge now, down to about the last 10%, taunting us.  "Eat me.  Eat me!" it says, and no woman (and few men) can resist the lure for long.

Perhaps we'll just have a couple of bites...

July 20, 2004

California Citrus Salad
Iceberg and Romaine Hearts, Avocado, Pecan Brittle, Green Apples, Golden Raisins, Dried Cranberries, Mandarin Wedges, Bleu Cheese Crumbles and Green Onions. Tossed with our Signature Citrus Dressing

And yes, I said I'd stop boring you with detailed descriptions of my diet. I'll try, I promise.

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