Mellow Mushroom

We visited the Chattanooga location close to Hamilton Place Mall on a Saturday evening.  We were promptly seated, menu's received and drink orders taken.  The waitress brought our drinks and had included lots of extra lemon with my iced tea a I requested.  This started things off well.
We ordered a steak and cheese calzone and a cheese calzone.  It took about 20 minutes to get our meal, but once received it was very good.  

This was my first visit to the Mellow Mushroom, but my wife had been a couple of times before.  I really didn't know what to expect but was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the calzone.

The only downside to the restaurant is the noise level and this it because of the building design with no acoustical absorption materials in the ceiling, and, because there were numerous TV's all on different stations.  

The Mellow Mushroom is a good place to bring the family and let the kid talk a lot, but not the place to bring a date for a romantic dinner and quite talk.

It was alright. I tried the Holy Shiitake Pie, but it just wasn't what I thought it would taste like. The place is clean and got a large selection of draft beer. The place is a open area to watch the pizza making and they got food show. Bathrooms got cool looking sink. Loud environment to talk in. Spent less than $17 with a fruit punch flavor Dasani. It was neat they got different flavor Dasani's and a peach Sprite too.

It's always nerve-wracking to return to a place you hadn't visited in a decade.  What if it stinks?  What does it say about you if you've changed to the point that you find it terrible?  I'd been a Mellow Mushroom fan during my time in Knoxville, so I headed to this location of Mellow Mushroom last time I was in Chattanooga feeling a bit nervous.

I'm relieved to say the food remains excellent.  The less adventurous in our group went for the meatlover's, but I convinced some of us to go with a bleu cheese, shrimp and sausage version that was the hit of the evening.  (Is it wrong to be moderately miffed when the same people that insisted on their meat pizza are fighting over the last slice of yours?)  They had a remarkable selection of beer as well, with some local beers I'd never tried rounding out the meal nicely.

The only disappointment was the service.  I'm going to assume our waitress was not going after me on purpose, because I don't think I'd ever met her before ... but she swung her tray at my head while she was serving someone else in our group, and she would have creamed me if I hadn't done a full-body, Matrix-style limbo move back at the last second.  She either didn't even notice she'd nearly killed me or was too embarrassed to apologize.  She also managed to spill every single beer I ordered, though luckily on the table and not on me.

Let me emphasize, however, that the food was so good that it's worth risking your life with the tray-decapitating service.  A great addition to Chattanooga.