We ate at Hungry Hunter earlier this week, pretty much by accident. What's a Hungry Hunter?  Other than a restaurant I keep wanting to type as "Hungry Hunger," which would be completely redundant, and quite possibly an upgrade over the actual name. Hungry Hunter is sort of a slightly-upscale Sizzler. A chain steakhouse, but it's old-fashioned; more like a low-rent Black Angus than a younger-skewing place like Outback. I'd never eaten there before, and had never even really thought about the restaurant chain. I guess they have locations in the San Diego area, since I vaguely know I've seen (and immediately forgotten) their commercials for years. But if I've ever seen one of their restaurants with my own two eyes, it made no impression whatsoever.  That's not real surprising, given that I haven't eaten steak since the late 80s, and people don't notice things they don't have any personal interest in.

Think of some type of food that you know exists, but that you never personally consider eating. Sushi or Thai or Greek or steak or whatever. Can you think of a restaurant nearby that specializes in that sort of food? Do you know where they stock that type of food in the supermarket? You know there must a restaurant of that type around (unless you live in the sticks or something) but you probably have no idea where one might be, even if you drive past it every day.  For example, I couldn't tell you the location of a single sushi place in San Diego, even though I saw probably 50 of them in the years I lived there. At the time I was not interested in eating sushi, so they were simply off my radar. I've since come to have some appreciation for sushi (not a lot; after all, it's basically settling for cold fish and cold rice, when both of those foods are much better hot) I still have no interest in steakhouses.

Fortunately, sushi places often serve other (hot) Japanese food that I like, such as shrimp and vegetable tempura, and steakhouses serve chicken and fish and salad and other things I like. After all, we had a pretty good meal at a Black Angus last November on Malaya's birthday, and we eat at Claim Jumper occasionally, and they serve every sort of cow-based entree. Though they've got a lot of other food as well.

We ate at Hungry Hunter on Saturday night, and the way that restaurant choice came about makes for an odd story. If you, for some reason, actually care about my Hungry Hunter review comments and not about how I came to eat there in the first place, you might want to skip ahead a few paragraphs.

Saturday afternoon we worked out at the gym before returning home for some outdoor kali practice. All that physical activity worked up a decent appetite, and as we walked back inside and headed for the shower, Malaya announced that she wanted to eat out that night. Her treat.  Buying us dinner is an option she enjoys, since she applied herself in highschool, got into a good college, worked hard there and got a good degree, then went to graduate school, and earned a real job with a real salary. I, on the other hand, squandered a decade of my life working at a part-time job that paid just enough to keep me alive, played a lot of computer games, spent 12 hours a day working on a nearly-dead computer games website, and wrote the occasional short story. The best move of my adult life? Hooking up with Malaya.

Anyway, she was buying dinner, after we did some shopping. The only question remaining was what/where to eat. Neither of us had a strong preference at that point, but since neither of us were hungry we decided to table that decision and think it over while running errands, hoping that our bellies would motivate us when the time came.  Our strategy worked, since about the time we were digging through the color-coded shelves of the Salvation Army thrift store (as detailed in Monday's blog) I realized that I wanted seafood; shrimp, ideally. We've long meant to try out The Fish Ranch, a seafood place in nearby Lafayette, and one that we had a coupon for buy one/get one entree free. So that was decided, and we finished shopping and drove gaily back here, forgetting the lesson our Entertainment Book has repeatedly taught us; always call ahead.

The reason you call ahead is that about 1/4 of the restaurants we picked out last year had closed since the coupon was printed, had changed owners/management and decided to no longer accept the coupons, or had changed names and food types entirely. The last option was our fate Saturday, and the restaurant formerly known as The Fish Ranch had a new sign proclaiming that it was now a sushi place. Malaya likes sushi, and I can tolerate it, but we weren't in the mood that night, not with fish in mind for me and some other form of cooked meat in Malaya's head.

So we sat in the empty parking lot few minutes, dismayed, while Malaya leafed through the book trying to find some other seafood place in the area. There were none that sounded like safe bets for the batter-fried shrimp I craved, but fortunately she remembered seeing a Hungry Hunter not more than two miles down the road, that we'd passed a few weeks before. And it was lucky she remembered it, since as I said above, it had left my mind entirely.

That long preamble dispensed with, how was the grub? Pretty mediocre.

There was initially some sticker shock at the prices, since they had rather plain fare, looking to be about Chili's or TGIF's in quality, but they wanted $17ish per entree, while those other places are more like $9 or $11 per. Is it always that expensive at Hungry Hunter, or was this one higher than usual, since it's out in the rich and white city of Pleasant Hill? I'll probably never know, since finding out would require eating at another Hungry Hunter in another location. Maybe on book tour some day, if they give me a per diem.

Anyway, I was a bit dismayed at the fried shrimp, since the menu said you only got half a dozen of them. Hell, Red Lobster gives you a dozen, 18 for a couple of bucks more, and those are pretty good-sized butterflied shrimp.  On the other hand, Claim Jumper only gives you five shrimp, but they are gigantic; I literally could not eat the whole order the one time I got them there, so I was hoping for more of the same from Hungry Hunter. I did not get it.

In addition to the main course, all entrees come with your choice of two sides, and soup or salad.  I got the "table side tossed salad" or something like that, and it was probably the highlight of the meal. The way it worked was that our waitress returned with a big tray and a plate. The tray held a strange sort of inclined lazy susan, with a big bowl of shredded iceberg lettuce in the center, and about a dozen little bowls of various ingredients arrayed around it, like moons. She tonged out a bunch of lettuce, asked me if it was enough, and then cycled through the sides; cucumber, cherry tomatoes, carrots, cheese, sunflower seeds, and so on. Asking each time if I wanted that one or not. It made for an amusing sort of auction-like interaction.

"Beets?"

"Nope."

"Tomatoes?"

"Lots."

"Cucumber?"

"Please."

"Garbanzo beans?"

"Nyet."

And so on.

My only complaint was the lack of purple onions, and I wouldn't have minded some mushrooms either, but it made for a pretty good mini-salad bar style salad.  The best ingredient? Croutons. I don't know when those crunchy salad toppers changed from dried bits of toast to super-flavored crackers, but I approve of the transformation. They make the house salad at Claim Jumper too, and they're almost too flavorful; as if an entire package of salad dressing seasoning has been condensed into one bite-sized hunk of filling-cracking fiber.

For her pre-dinner thing, Malaya got clam chowder and said it was okay. Like most clam chowder, it was ruined by those annoying rubbery hunks of protoplasm they insist upon sinking to the depths of the spooge-filled bowl. I have no idea what those chewy things are, but I guess they give it flavor; sort of like putting a bay leaf into soup. You can't eat that either, but it makes the stuff taste better.

The sides with dinner were less-inspiring. I selected onion rings and rice pilaf, and while the rice wasn't bad, it was just a spoonful of wild rice flavor Rice 'a Roni stuff, spread beneath my shrimp. I could almost see the inexhaustibly-huge steaming metal pan of it in the kitchen.  It certainly beat the onion rings, of which I received four. Four! They were small and plain too, like what you'd get out of a bag of Oreidas in the frozen foods section of the supermarket. Nothing even faintly-resembling the glorious onion rings Claim Jumper serves up, just for the sake of comparision.

The shrimp themselves? Okay. Not bad, but not very big; about what you would pay $8 a pound for in the supermarket. Tempura-style beer batter breading which had little flavor, and some interesting salsa-style cocktail sauce that looked better than it tasted. I went with catsup, after a taste and a shrug.

Malaya seemed to enjoy her dinner more than I, and since she paid for it I'm glad. She had four lamb chops and said the mint sauce was awesome, and she seemed to like her tree-like hunk of steamed broccoli, though the baked potato was unremarkable.

Dinner was also served with a small loaf of sourdough-esque bread that came on a little miniature cutting board and serrated knife. Fun presentation, even though it was rather finger-endangering, since the knife was not very sharp and the bread was quite hard on the outside. We devoured our first loaf of that and got another one, and it was a good thing since neither of us were at all full from our dinners, so we polished off the second loaf after eating everything else, and still had room for ice cream at home.  You can directly contrast this to Claim Jumper, where we often don't even manage to get through half of our entrees, and can barely fit the leftovers into two styrofoam doggy boxes easily large enough to make up another full meal.

I don't have a restaurant rating score, but I'd give Hungry Hunter about a 4.5 overall. It wasn't bad, but it was expensive, the portions were small, and the service was just okay. The food was about as good as what you can get at Baker's Square or Marie Callender's, but it cost maybe $5 more per entree for a bit better quality meat, and came with less side dish, by quantity as well as quality.  Admittedly though, I'm not much of a carnivore, and Hungry Hunter and Black Angus are really for people who want steaks, with the other stuff on the menu just sort of there so the steak-lovers can drag more health-conscious members of their family along for the ride.