Due to both anxiety and my love of buffets, I often find it difficult to decide what kind of food I want, because truly, I just want everything. For these reasons, I am always relieved to find any sort of combo special or fusion restaurant. This week, I was delighted to discover Tricia’s Kitchen, a restaurant that serves up both soul food and Puerto Rican food.
Unfortunately, delivery was not the way to experience Tricia’s. What we ordered on GrubHub was a combo plate of two meats and three sides, and we chose the baked pineapple chicken, oxtails, macaroni and cheese, collard greens, and seafood salad.
Right around when our food was supposed to be delivered, the restaurant called saying that they didn’t have oxtails or seafood salad, so we swapped those for the baked pork and ribs respectively. We also ordered pineapple upside down cake, which they also apparently didn’t have, so we switched that for red velvet after some confusion. After all this, what we actually ended up receiving was a plate with chicken, ribs, collard greens, macaroni, rice, and cornbread. So, yeah, not sure what was going on there.
Anyhow, we trekked on with the food we had, which was actually good, for the most part. The baked pineapple chicken was definitely the most flavorful thing we tried. It had some great sweet and acidic pineapple flavor and just a tiny little hint of something spicy. And it was cooked very nicely: super juicy. The pork ribs, while not quite as flavorful, were also cooked very well. They were soft, moist, and very tender. The barbecue sauce, while nice, was solely sweet and could have used some heat or acidity for balance.
On to the sides: The collard greens were just what I wanted. They were cooked well and salted generously and had some tasty, chewy bits of meat (which I believe was pork), and I liked how they were cut into big strips rather than chopped up small. I really enjoyed the macaroni and cheese as well. Although it was a bit dry and not really flavorful at all, it was that good homey kind of mac ‘n’ cheese that you want with your barbecue. It was, however, mysteriously sweet, and I really could not place why. Nonetheless, a good homestyle macaroni. And even though I neither ordered nor wanted the rice, I still tried it for the sake of all my adoring fans out there.
It was fine. Like a lot of the other food from Tricia’s, it was cooked well and had the very beginning of some nice flavor, but that could have been intensified a lot.
Another thing that I did not order and randomly received but actually was excited about was the corn muffin! And it was lovely. It was warm, sweet, soft, and fluffy. Now, as much as I was living for this corn muffin and did thoroughly enjoy it, I must say that it had the exact flavor and texture of a Betty Crocker cake. So either Tricia is following Betty Crocker recipes online or she’s making her Betty Crocker corn muffins straight out of the box. Either way, it was yummy, so you can decide if this is something that matters to you personally.
Also yummy (though not quite as yummy as the corn muffin) and potentially from a box was the red velvet cake. The cake was a bit overbaked, which made it dry around the edges, but it was still super moist and fluffy in the center — the literal exact same texture as boxed cakes, yet again. The sponge did have a nice flavorful sweetness to it, though, and it was miles better than the frosting adorning it. This was definitely premade frosting from a can — and not even a good one, at that. It had a very chemical sweetness to it and the texture was gummy and sticky and left a weird powdery feeling behind in my mouth. I think this was a bundt cake, which means there were no layers. It was just a large chunk of cake with a tiny bit of frosting on the very top which was not a good ratio, but was probably for the best with this particular frosting.
I think, at the very least, you should be able to trust that a restaurant will serve you the food that you order. Of course, mistakes can be made and ingredients can run out, but when half of my large order isn’t available and then I also receive a couple random items after I already had to substitute for the unavailable food, that’s not so good. Plus, if you remember from way back, I substituted the oxtails with the baked pork over the phone, and I didn’t even receive that in the end. I got rice instead, which is absolutely not a fair substitute, especially without my knowledge. Overall, Tricia’s had some nice food — like the chicken, greens, and macaroni — but the not-so-nice other foods plus the hassle of ordering will likely prevent me from revisiting this one.
