Apple salad is back at Ruby Tuesday! Huzzah!

If I tell you it was Waldorf salad, you'd probably think that it had walnuts in it. It doesn't. Either that, or if it did, the walnuts were doing a really good job of hiding. It's possible; the mayo was pretty thick. But apple salad is wonderful, no matter what.

Originally, No Walnuts

Actually, when Oscar Tschirky came up with the salad in 1893, the Waldorf Astoria served a salad of diced red-skinned apples, celery and mayo, nothing else. These days, you usually find walnuts and grapes in Waldorf salad.

That's why I prefer to call all the variants "apple salad". At family get-togethers, there are likely to be two or three people bringing it, and they will all use different ingredients. Some use Thompson (green) grapes, and some use red grapes. Some use walnuts, some use whole almonds, some use slivered almonds, some use peanuts. Some use raisins instead of fresh grapes; some use raisins in addition to fresh grapes, some use neither. Mama liked to use miniature marshmallows, usually the multi-colored kind. A sister-in-law once brought it with pine nuts, chopped pistachio nuts, dill weed, and craisins (sweetened dried cranberries) instead of grapes or raisins. That was interesting and good.

John Chapman Would Approve

But the heart of the salad is apples, and I don't know of any other chain that regularly offers an apple salad. Having it on the salad bar was one of the reasons we used to go to Ruby Tuesday's on a regular basis.

Then they stopped. The third time they didn't have it, we asked the server why, and she said that they used to order their salads from a commissary, but switched to making them in the restaurant, so that they'd be fresher. That's fine with me, I said, but why not make apple salad in the restaurant. She didn't know, and said the manager had no explanation; I'd have to contactl their headquarters to discuss it, but when asked for an address, she came back with a telephone number instead. The number didn't work.

And actually, Johnny Appleseed would not have approved of modern apple salad. He had religious objections to grafting. If you simply plant seeds from apples, and don't graft scions on the rootstock from a named variety of apple, you probably will end up with apples that are small, sour, and misshapen. They make nice applejack, and they're perfectly fine for baking pies and cooking snitz and knepp, but they aren't so great for eating raw.

Ruby Tuesday is into natural, fresh, minimally processed, no additive dining these days. Johnny Appleseed would have approved of that, even though he was a vegetarian, and Ruby Tuesday serves a lot of beef.

We Were Excited!

We haven't been eating out much lately. I suspect that may be true for you as well. Their 10-Q for the quarter ending in March says that Ruby Tuesday's sales dropped 10% from the previous year, which is actually pretty good. Many restaurants saw a 50% drop in sales.

I had to go to the Post Office to mail some stuff, that commodity that George Carlin said we become burdened with. I decided that since green is the "in" color, I'd get rid of some of my stuff, making this little house slightly less crowded, and put a little green in my pocket at the same time. Bausman offers a friendly and convenient Post Office, unlike Lancaster, and Manor Shopping Center is just a stone's throw away, so we decided to drop in to Ruby Tuesday's for the first time in a raccoon's age.

Memphis Ribs

Marie was in the back of the van, and most restaurants don't appreciate four-footed clientele. It was hot enough that we needed to leave the windows down on the van, but Ruby Tuesday's parking lot is somewhat isolated. We sat where we could keep an eye on the parking lot - but nobody was scoping out the vehicles' contents. I suspect a long-haired German Shepherd weighing over 100 pounds would intimidate any would-be thief, but Blondie figures that thieves would want to steal Marie.

In any case, Marie scolded me silently for leaving her in the van while I left. I'm part of the family, Dad. I deserve to go any place YOU go. I didn't have any choice. I had to have rib bones for Marie when I returned - except that you do have a choice at Ruby Tuesday's. They offer two styles of ribs. I ordered the Memphis style ribs, which are a dry-rub rib, as compared to the ribs slathered in a red barbeque sauce, like every other restaurant offers. It's not that Memphis-style ribs are better than barbecue sauce ribs; they're not. They're simply a welcome change.

Ribs are a highly profitable item for restaurants. The materials are cheap, and most people either don't know how to prepare them, or else they don't want to bother. It doesn't take much manpower, but ribs spend a long time cooking. They're best when smoked, but restaurants typically just stick use an oven, and stick some chemical smoke in the seasoning. Ruby Tuesday does an average good job. Mine order at Ruby Tuesday was overcooked, but there are worse sins than that. My own ribs are better - and I don't have a smoker - but twenty minutes before I pulled into Ruby Tuesday's parking lot, I had no idea I was going to have ribs. If I'd gone home and made my own, it'd be the next day before I ate.

Keep It Clean, Buster!

One of the things I like about Ruby Tuesday is that they keep the place extremely clean. That's not just the RT in Manor; the one on the north side of town is clean, too. You might want to think about that this year; they're expecting the Swine Flu to come back in September. First go-around, the Swine Flu was pretty innocuous. Relatively few people caught it; with regular flu, one person can infect 30,000 people in a week, and I don't think there were 10,000 across the entire US that got Swine Flu last winter. Relatively few people died; the regular flu killed many times more people.

But in 1918, the Spanish Flu was also pretty innocuous, first time around, and when it returned, it hit hard, and they were burying people left and right. You might want to avoid restaurants that aren't scrupulously clean. The last thousand times I went into Burger King, the people on the front line would stand around kicking their toes into the floor impatiently, waiting for the crew in the back to get the food prepared, while there would be french fries strewn on a dirty, greasy floor. If you've got time to lean, folks, you've got time to clean.

Maintenance

Ruby Tuesday also seems to be well-maintained. Visit some restaurants, and the seating almost collapses underneath you. I remember visiting a self-styled steakhouse on Lincoln Highway East a few years ago. They asked us, in the middle of our meal, if we'd mind standing up for a minute. They needed light bulbs which were supposedly stored in the seats of our booth. Nope, they weren't. But they didn't put the seats back right, and I almost fall in when the seat collapsed. I was not amused.

Then they tried to change the light bulbs in the lamps hanging immediately over our table. It's not particularly enjoyable to have people climbing over you, hanging from ladders, while you're trying to eat. Somebody dislodged something, and suddenly, there was a big clump of dust that landed next to my Pepsi. I asked the person above me to step down for a moment, and move the ladder so I could stand up. Grumbling about the interruption to her work, she did. I then collected my wife, and we left, mid-meal, without paying, never to return.

But at Ruby Tuesday, not only were the tables and chairs as attractive and as functional as when they were new, but even the lighting fixtures were clean.

Broccoli, Salt and Pepper

If you blanch broccoli - heat it up, then shock it in ice water - it turns a very pretty dark green color. They'd obviously done that to my steamed broccoli. It was attractive, and it had a nice texture, not at all overcooked. Unfortunately, it was not at all flavorful. The raw broccoli on the salad bar, at least it tasted of broccoli. Perhaps if they'd buttered the broccoli lightly, it would have helped.

I tried salting the broccoli, but while the salt and pepper were in rather attractive dispensers, the salt that was dispensed was extremely fine, almost as fine as popcorn salt. It is a peculiarity of the taste buds that you need more salt to season food if it's fine, and that's bad news for people who people who are on low-sodium diets. A shaker that dispenses kosher salt (nothing particularly jewish about kosher salt, it's simply larger grains) would be a vast improvement.

Instead of pepper shakers, they had matching pepper mills. In theory, pepper mills are far superior, because fresh ground peppercorns should have more piquant oils than tasteless, dried-out ground pepper. On the other hand, it's a pain to have to work for your pepper. A better solution would be to use granular, rather than finely-ground pepper, in shakers. It'd be a shame to abandon those expensive elegant salt shakers and pepper mills, but they're just not doing the trick.

Taters and Tea

The menu mentions that they have hot tea, and flavored iced tea, but they offer plain, ordinary unsweet, unlemoned iced tea as well, if you ask for it, which I did. It arrived in a Pepsi-sized tumbler, rather than an iced-tea glass, which might be an aesthetic decision on their part. The reason for using those oversized iced tea glasses, of course, is that you want lots of ice in your iced tea, so that it's really cold, but if you put tons of ice in a regular tumbler, there's not much fluid there to drink.

The waitress - smartly dressed, very clean, appropriately attentive and fairly efficient - was beyond reproach. She came by and offered me a refill of my iced tea from a pitcher - and realized that there were very few ice cubes in my glass. She returned a moment later with a second glass, filled to the brim with ice cubes. Ruby Tuesday uses small ice cubes, not crushed ice that gets caught in your straw, and not large cubes that fill up the glass without offering much chilling power.

Oh, and the mashed potatoes. They were overcooked or overprocessed. They had almost turned to liquid starch, like wallpaper paste. I don't mind that. I tend to do the same thing deliberately when cooking mashed potatoes for myself, but neither my late first wife, Em, nor my second wife, Blondie, care for them that way.

Salad Notes

Both Blondie and I chose their honey mustard dressing for our lettuce salad. She thought the dressing ought to be sweeter, and added a packet of sugar to her salad. I thought it was one of the best mustard dressings I'd ever had in a restaurant; it was very mustardy and tangy.

I think there used to be pine nuts and raisins on the salad bar. There didn't appear to be any on Monday. They did have some large, very interesting croutons. They have real bacon on their salad bar. Jon Stewart, on Monday night's Daily Show, commented that that's one important benefit of not eating Kosher, and I have to agree; plastic bacon just doesn't cut the mustard.

Noise Factors

Many restaurants are incredibly noisy places. Although we arrived almost exactly at 12 noon on Monday, though, Ruby Tuesday was not particularly noisy. It was quite easy to carry on a conversation with my wife in a normal speaking voice. Again, this is an area where preferences may vary; some people don't like to be bothered having to listen to their spouse.

The muzak, at one point, had a cover of some young artist performing Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi." I'm not sure who it was, but it was obvious that the performer and the arranger had grown up in the era of rap music, and weren't particularly familiar with the concepts of "melody" and "harmony". They also had strange phrasing. I suppose it simply means I'm over the hill. There have been a gazillion artists that have "covered" that song, and most of them, I enjoy. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

The restaurant chain, though, was started in 1972, and named for a Rolling Stones hit from 1967. (It was actually the "B" side of "Let's Spend The Night Together") I have to wonder how well Sandy Beall, the company founder, would enjoy that Big Yellow Taxi cover. Perhaps Ruby Tuesday figures that people who were listening to the Stones in 1967 are too old, and they're trying to work their way to a younger demographic.

It's A Strange Name

It's always struck me as an odd name for a restaurant. The song repeatedly says, "So long, Ruby Tuesday", when a restauranteur would be better off saying Hello, not Good Bye. "Dying all the time. Lose your dreams, And you will lose your mind. Ain't life unkind?" The alternatives, though, among Stones hits, aren't much better. "I Can't Get No Satisfaction". "Mother's Little Helper" (which, if you don't know, is a song about tranquilizers), "The Last Time", "Paint It Black", "19th Nervous Breakdown", "Get Off My Cloud". Of course, there is always "Brown Sugar", but the chain started out in Tennessee in 1972, but unless it's a bake shop, that'd probably have been an poor choice for a restaurant in the racist south.

The servers, though, are dressed appropriately for "Paint It Black". And "When you change with every new day" sorta emphasizes their fresh, natural, no-preservatives approach to dining.

The apple salad isn't the only reason I'll be going back to Ruby Tuesday. A restaurant manager has a million details to take care of, and he needs to get virtually all of them right, or at least not terribly wrong. It's a tough job to do right. Of course, it's a tough job being a good cook or a good waitperson. The restaurant industry ain't for sissies.

I haven't decided if Ruby Tuesday is my new favorite chain restaurant, yet, but they certainly are "moving up with a bullet". As long as they don't start offering Goat's Head Soup, I don't imagine that Wild Horses could keep me away.

(A side note to my waitress. It occurred to me in the middle of the night that I neglected to leave a tip. I am so embarrassed. You deserve a nice tip. Be sure to tell your dad to read this review; I'm sure he's already proud of you, but he should know how highly others think of his daughter. I will be going to the Bausman post office again on Tuesday, so I'll stop in and leave your tip with the hostess. Make sure you ask her for it.)

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Bausman - Big Yellow Taxi - cleanliness - iced tea - Johnny Appleseed - Joni Mitchell - mashed potatoes - Memphis ribs - noise - Oscar Tschirky - pepper mills - Post Office - Ruby Tuesday - salt shakers - Sandy Buell - Swine Flu - Waldorf Salad