CoffeeBear.net

Al’s Back!

Posted by Mark | Filed under Dining Out, Food, Reviews

The floods which dev­as­tated Iowa in 2008 wiped out many busi­ness around Cedar Rapids, but one in par­tic­u­lar which has been missed was Zindrick’s. It was a fine din­ing restau­rant spe­cial­iz­ing in Czech food and which made the most won­der­ful cherry strudel ever con­ceived by man. This past Tues­day Zindrick’s at long last re-opened (under the new name of Al’s Blue Toad). My wife and I decided to go over to it for din­ner to show our sup­port for Al’s big reopening.

Mind you, the name isn’t the only thing that’s changed. Before the bar was a minor fea­ture of the restau­rant, now the restau­rant feels to be a minor fea­ture of the bar.  Pre-flood the walls were adorned with prints of Alphonse Mucha’s art­work and pho­tos from the Czech Repub­lic. Now the walls abound with flat screen TVs dis­play­ing var­i­ous sports chan­nels. The menu has also changed adding newer, cheaper options. And while some old favourites remain (Chicken Paprika, Czech Goulash, etc..), some things are quite notice­ably missing.

The first thing that caught my eye as miss­ing from the menu was the dessert sec­tion. Yes, that’s right while Al is back, the Blue Toad does not cur­rently offer his famous strudel. When we noticed this glar­ing omis­sion from the menu, my wife asked our wait­ress about it and was told that they don’t offer desserts.

We were crushed. After wait­ing over a year and a half for our next slice of Al’s strudel, to find out they weren’t offer­ing it any more was heart­break­ing. But refus­ing to give up on it entirely, we caught Al as he was walk­ing past our table and asked him about it. Al reas­sured us that he plans to bring back the strudel; he just didn’t want to bur­den his cooks any more than he already had with it being open­ing night.

Quite a bit later¹ after we’d ordered and received our food; we real­ized there were a cou­ple more changes to the menu than we’d noticed. One was all the Czech din­ner options now come with a cup of soup instead of apple sauce. The night we were there, the soup was chilli and a rather tasty chilli at that. The other change we’d not noticed was they appar­ently don’t do potato dumplings any more and only have bread dumplings.

But these aren’t tiny, dried up bread dumplings. These dumplings were moist and roughly the size of a hockey puck. And they tasted quite good dipped into my Czech Goulash, though they were much bet­ter with the brown gravy served over them on my wife’s plate of Chicken Paprika.

The por­tions that we received were smaller than I remem­ber them being on prior vis­its, but on the pos­i­tive side they were still fill­ing and the cost was down con­sid­er­ably². And that lower price point for the meal will help to draw me back to Al’s in the future, even though the enlarged bar means it won’t be our “spe­cial” place anymore.

¹ As near as I could tell, all of the wait staff was new. Add in that this was open­ing night and things moved slowly & chaot­i­cally.
² Prior din­ners with two entrees, 2 iced teas and 2 desserts usu­ally came around $35–40 range. This visit with two entrees, 2 iced teas & 1 craft-brew beer was only $26.

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