Lake Trout in the Desert: Steenbock's on Orchard

Steenbock's on Orchard, one of Food Fight's Lilliputian (not so much) empire, is okay. Just okay. It's a nice, if a bit sterile (all see-through glass/plastic panels), dining environment, but T. and I were greatly disappointed with our food.

Plus, I'm still not thrilled about Food Fight's refusal to forfeit its Wisconsin Restaurant Association membership during the protests, even though the WRA contributed to the Walker administration. To employ a very bad pun, it put a bad taste in my mouth.

To the food! I had the lake trout piccata. Lake trout, itself, is already a very oily fish (and packed with omega-3s like DHA and EPA!), so I'm not sure why you'd go the piccata route. Une petite leçon about piccata: The word piccata is the Italian feminine version of piccato, which means "larded." That's right, larded. So it’s food that’s been sliced and sautéed and then served with a sauce of lemon, butter, and spices.

On the menu, it's described as being comprised of seared trout, Middle Eastern cous cous, cauliflower, swiss chard, and lemon caper butter. Sounds pretty simple, right?

Nope. The seared trout itself had a good flavor and was slightly crisp at one point in its life. However, the dish was so inundated with capers that they completely drowned out the lemon and made the formerly crisp, flaky exterior rather soggy. My mouth was left feeling like I'd chewed on one of those silica desiccant packets.

As for the cous cous, cauliflower, and swiss chard, they were mostly MIA. I rescued six overcooked, tiny pieces of chard from drowning in the sauce (poor bastards never had a chance), and perhaps the cauliflower must’ve been riced and folded into the meager amounts of cous cous hiding underneath the fish.

T.’s grilled romaine salad with chicken wasn’t much better. This was supposed to be romaine tossed with bagna càuda, preserved lemon, mint, walnut, and sarvecchio.

First things first, the salad and chicken were freezing, leading us to believe it’d been pre-made and hanging out in the cooler plastic wrapped within an inch of its life—like those creepy alien abduction film characters who are sealed in plastic bags and struggling to breathe and escape. In my world, grilled means that it was recently grilled, so the romaine is at least lukewarm. Also, the slivers of preserved lemons didn’t satisfy our curiosity about how they taste. We decided we’ll make them ourselves and test it out.