Chilis To Go - A Review

Yesterday I was planning on making some chicken and rice soup for dinner, using that wonderful recipe that I found in Better Homes and Gardens magazine, the recipe where you choose from an ingredients list and the pot of soup comes out basically foolproof and actually tastes pretty darn good. For soup, that is. I'm not a big soup fan, to me soup is only good when there is bread or crusty rolls and lots of butter alongside, it seems to lack something without the bread part. I definitely do not like canned soup with the exception of Andersens split pea, the pieces of meat in the soup always look kind of manufactured or made out of play-doh and the vegetables look like the really cheap frozen vegetables that you know are probably made from the potatoes and carrots that are all deformed and half rotten. Not to mention the huge amounts of salt that they put into the soup to give it some flavor.

Anyway, I was going to make soup for dinner since I wanted something that didn't have to be chewed too much because I just had a tooth extracted after all, but I had taken one of the super duper pain relievers and was feeling kind of sleepy and extremely lazy. More lazy than usual. Keith suggested just going to get some soup and we thought of the Vons fresh? soup that comes in plastic tubs, but the one time I tried their soup I wasn't all that impressed. I kind of wanted some of Mimi's Cafe's corn chowder (yum) but it's like 8 miles away and it seems kind of stupid to drive 8 miles just to get some soup (even if it is totally delicious) so decided to look online and see what the restaurants nearby had in the way of soup. Not much, but Chili's does have a potato soup and a chicken enchilada soup on their to go menu, and it's close by so we'll give them a try.

I also ordered some appetizers, the potato skins and the mozzarella sticks, mozzarella sticks being one of my all time favorite junky type foods to eat because who doesn't like deep fried cheese? Dipped in ranch dressing. You can pay online too, so I did and the food was supposed to be ready in about 15 minutes.

We go over to pick it up and first the cashier says that it looks like my credit card didn't go through and I'm like yes it did and here is my receipt. So, she does something with the register and whaddya know, there is my payment. She goes to pack up all the food and gives it to us and we take it home only to find that everything is cold. And your 4.95 bowl of soup is more like a demitasse cup of soup, and it's lukewarm at best. We warmed up the potato skins and fried cheese. The potato skin tasted okay, like the frozen potato skins you can buy at the grocery store, but whatever the breading is they put on the cheese tasted very strange and after a few bites I gave up on the cheese. Which for me is extremely unusual. Me not eat the fried cheese? Unheard of.

The soup wasn't much better, the enchilada soup tasted fine but the pieces of chicken in it just did not look appetizing at all, almost like processed and re-formed chicken loaf or something, and the potato soup tasted like they just poured it out of a Cambell's can.

So for $21.00 plus tip because they have a HUGE tip jar right by the register that guilts you into tipping, we got an almost inedible meal that tasted like it came out of cans and freezer boxes. Which it probably did.

Lesson learned here, don't order off the to go menu or maybe don't even go into the restaurant ever again. The place is always packed with people, but maybe it's the booze that brings them in and not the food. Very disappointing and a total waste of money. Seriously, Campbell's soup would have tasted the same and saved about $18.00.