My Faith Restored!

Throughout the past few weeks I’ve come to realize that reviewing fish fries is a little like training for the half marathon. In the beginning, it all very seems fun and exciting. A few weeks in, this excitement slowly begins to fade and the task starts to feel a little monotonous. Then, something I’ve learned recently in the case of the fish fries is that this monotony can quickly turn into regret when triggered by an unfortunate experience, of which I like to refer to as the St. Pius fish fry.

After such an experience, any reasonable person could understand why I was dreading spending yet another Friday night choking down greasy-fied frozen fish and cold canned green beans. Then I remembered why I started this in the first place. This blog serves as a guide to all the God-fearing and fish-loving people out there who are forever in search of a good meal that will satisfy and at the same time save them from succumbing to the temptation to eat meat on Fridays during Lent. It also serves as a source of weekly entertainment for my friends and family during their lunch break. Deciding that I could not let my readers down, I had no choice but to be brave and learn to bring more beer money. So with the support of about 20 of my closest, friends, family and colleagues, I made St. Joan of Arc the fourth stop on the 2008 fish fry tour.

To my delight, the team at St. Joan of Arc managed to restore my faith in fish fries and inspired me to continue on with my mission – and that’s not just the beer talking.

Wait time: The team at St. J of A took an innovative approach to keeping the wait time to a minimum. The staff would go through the line and tell half of the dine-in customers to get into the carry-out line in order to even up the lines and cut down on the wait time. While most in our group are accustomed to using this tactic on a weekly basis, it was nice to have permission for once.

Price: Bargain basement prices with six bucks buying one a healthy serving of fish, two sides and a drink. One thing that was troublesome was that dessert was not included in the price of the meal. This left many in our group confused and without dessert ticket. Oh well, this just meant prime selection for me!

Taste: Overall the food was good and most importantly, edible. I must say while I’m usually not a mac’n’cheese kind of girl, the mac’n’cheese was creamy and delicious. My cod was a little overdone, but slather on a little extra tarter sauce and it might have been the best fish produced at a fish fry this year. However, I do have to subtract a few points for the fried salmon still having a tail intact – gross! Makes one wonder what happened to the head.

Atmosphere: The crowd seemed very friendly and unusually normal for a fish fry crowd. Maybe this was because half the room was made up of my family friends and co-workers. Way to represent!

Overall rating: 9 out of 10 fish patties