Mendoza Wine Bar & Music

Mendoza Wine Bar has great food and wine selection. Friendly place and perfect atmosphere. Highly recommended.

It does have wine, yes.

It also has an owner with a serious attitude and a cook who doesn't know that you can't thaw scallops in your armpit (bowl of water, whatever) and then cook them only on the outside, then serve them. Yes, dumb, ordering scallops in Iowa, but the food peoples have been so damn intent on showing me how cosmo this place is that I said okay, let's go, bring on those cholesterol-ridden bay chunks. I waited forever, then got three -- yes, three -- scallops on a plate, and was partway through them before I realized eeeuugh, raw, baby!

I took them to the bar and scolded whoever was there, which turned out to be the owner, and told him look, if you don't know how to cook these, take 'em off the menu, because this isn't funny. He tried to get que-sera-sera on me, and I said yeah, what will be is a lawyer and a health inspector if I get food poisoning; stop offering these, you'll make people sick.

So he comes over to our table to tell me not to tell him to run his restaurant, which is the wrong thing to tell a lady after work who's had two glasses of wine and no dinner _and_ you've fed her the kind of food that's a vector for bacterial infection. So he went away, our plates vanished, and we were encouraged by all means to move along. They were also too busy to cook us something else that didn't come with a risk of vibrio poisoning.

What else? Oh, the 60something jazz-guitar-stylings dude who got really annoyed when asked to turn his amp down, seeing as how it was drowning out local conversation.

The waitress was hella nice, but um I think I'll drink my wine someplace else from now on.

ha! managed to screw up a cheese plate and a glass of wine. impressive.