In Search of a Sampler

When my friends Bethany and Lisa and I get together, we talk about anything and everything that’s going on in our lives. Family, marriages, kids, work, dream jobs, and daydreams. Sometimes the outing is planned in advance; on other occasions one of us calls an emergency meeting. We might be drinking martinis, coffee, or Diet Coke. There’s just one more thing we need on the table – a sampler.

What is a sampler? Ideally, it’s a plate holding a variety of delectable (mostly fried) appetizers in sharable quantities. For us, that means at least three of everything; spare us the appetizer fractions. Think mozzarella sticks, BBQ wings, chicken fingers, and so on. What could be better than a sampler among friends? (Fortunately, we’re not big on dieting.)

I think our sampler addiction began at Johnny Malloy’s on Coventry in Cleveland Heights. Johnny Malloy’s is in the old Centrum Theatre – now a sports bar with gigantic TVs to watch the big game. Not totally our speed for a girls’ night out, but an excellent sampler, just as you might expect. The Combo Platter includes plentiful quantities of wings, mozzarella sticks, BBQ ribs, potato skins, and chicken fingers. At $12.99 it’s more than enough for all three of us and the variety can’t be beat. Unfortunately, when the Ohio smoking ban went into effect, Johnny’s was – how shall I put this delicately – maybe less than fully compliant? Residually smoky? Whatever it was, the sampler was great, but the air quality was not. We had to move on.

Sports bars seem like the perfect sampler setting: lots of hungry sports fans looking for delicious fried goodness. Through a series of mishaps, our most recent meeting got bumped to the Tavern Company on Lee Road in Cleveland Heights. We had intended to sip margaritas at Lopez down the road, but this being Cleveland, Lopez was tightly shuttered by 9 p.m. on a school night. So we settled into a booth at TavCo and started looking for a sampler. Sad to say, there is no such thing on the menu. It’s always disappointing to find a sampler-worthy selection of appetizers, and yet, the powers-that-be have not seen fit to offer a sampler platter. What are they thinking? Do we have to do everything all the time? And didn’t we just leave our husbands and children for the evening to escape that very feeling?

We got to work creating our own. We ordered mozzarella sticks, hot wings, and, for a change of pace, crab cakes. We sipped our drinks and waited. Then the pseudo-sampler showed up. The crab cakes were underwhelming – a bit on the soggy side, and the whole shrimp embedded in the crab cakes were disconcerting, like something you’d expect in a Vietnamese dish, but not in your trusty sampler. And there were only two crab cakes on the plate (see appetizer fractions, above). The wings were passable. But most remarkable of all were the mozzarella sticks. Round 1: the mozzarella sticks arrived as hollow, empty shells. That’s right, no cheese inside. We peered through them at each other just to be certain, then called the waitress. She shared our horror and disbelief, and returned the crusty shells to the kitchen. Round 2: hot and cheesy, but still rather bizarre. The outer shell was a wide rectangular shape, not round, and too big for the amount of cheese inside. The cheese itself was unusually sticky, stubbornly clinging to lips and fingers. We looked like our little kids trying to eat something messy. The accompanying marinara (we think) was darkly colored like old ketchup, thick, and chunky. I don’t think anyone dared to dip. Overall, disappointing and overpriced. And we had to do all the work.

Which brings us to our best-kept sampler secret, discovered by Lisa, who is partial to getting together at home now that she has a nursing infant. Arby’s – yes Arby’s – offers all the makings of a first-class sampler at a fraction of the restaurant price, with most sampler fare on the Sides and Sidekickers menu. Drive through and order the mozzarella sticks, jalapeño bites, and perhaps the loaded potato bites, onion petals, or even popcorn chicken. Our favorites are the mozzarella sticks and jalapeño bites, which are always piping hot and delicious. Proceed to a friend’s couch and create your own ambience. After creating a tasty sampler, how hard can it be?