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Garlic Magic Restaurant |
 ednesday
night we had an interesting dinner, at Garlic Magic over in Walnut
Creek. With a name like that, you shouldn't have much trouble guessing
what their favorite seasoning is. I suggested to Malaya that they
should hang up a sign in the front window declaring it to be a
guaranteed vampire-free zone, and she laughed a lot more than I thought
the fairly-pedestrian joke deserved.
She was taking me out to dinner for reasons I'm not going to get into here, but we were both interested in trying the place out, so no one was dragged kicking and screaming. We also had a "buy one get one free" coupon from the big Entertainment book, which cost us $30 and which has already paid for itself about two times over in savings. Of course most of the savings are for things we probably wouldn't have paid for sans coupon, but that's not the point! As for the Garlic Magic food, it was pretty good. Garlic-y, of course, and we both like garlic, so we were down with that. The French bread was glorious, with butter and a plate of mashed raw garlic to spread over it. I'd never tasted such potent garlic before; it would burn your lips or tongue if you got some directly on them, and water did nothing to cool the heat, though it mellowed pretty quickly on its own. We also got an eggplant dish appetiser which was eggplant mashed with crushed walnuts and a cream sauce served with lots of little flatbread squares. Tasty, especially when you mixed some of the mashed fresh garlic into it. We both enjoyed our entrees; I got garlic shrimp stir fry with mushrooms and other veggies and rice. The sauce was glorious, though the shrimp was just okay. Not fried enough, IMHO. Malaya got spinach tortellini with a cream sauce and she enjoyed it well enough, and we even splurged on a chocolate layer cake for dessert. The restaurant itself was plunked down in a strip mall and was pretty poorly-decorated. Bad feng shui with the front wall all glass and the entrance right in the middle of the room, with tables to all the sides. Too open and noisy. When we arrived there were two tables in use and one of the parties left right after we sat down, so we were alone and feeling sorry for the place, which had about 4 cooks and 3 waitresses/waiters working. It's painful to drive by a restaurant and see the staff standing around, desperate for someone to come in and buy their food. However people kept coming in and coming in, and by the time we left the place was 2/3 full and bustling. We enjoyed it for a one time thing, but I can't see us going back there again now that we don't have a $9 off coupon.
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| Originally posted in the update November 27, 2003. |
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All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007. |
