It's Andy Fish!

This particular restaurant group boasts three of the best places to dine and for many people are considered the best restaurants in the Woo.

For those of you outside of Central Ma– we have a lot of great dining options here. I know, we’re not Boston, but I have news for you Boston; you aren’t New York and don’t get a big head New York there are a lot of upstart smaller cities around the USA that are throwing heat with your Michelin star offerings AND you are able to park your car without getting towed and not deal with a deranged homeless dude who’s decided today is the day he needs to collect human heads.

But Central Ma has a lot of good restaurants; We’ve eaten at all three of these and through some gifting happenstance we ended up with something like $46,700 worth of gift cards that can be used at any of them– so we went often, and the comical nature of it is we had a pattern that we unintentionally followed;

• Arrive at restaurant of choice.

• Eat a great meal.

• Run up the bill with cocktails and appetizers and deserts

• Realize we forgot the gift card or the one we brought has a zero balance.
• Do it all over again.

This meant a LOT of meals.

Overall, I managed to scrounge up some opinions about each place;

111 Chophouse – Upscale steakhouse, it’s modern themed and it’s very loud. I had an excellent steak here, a really disappointed Baked Haddock which was buried in cream sauce, a mediocre steak and a really lousy Osso De Buco which was both bland and tastless and came with a sauce that was truly bitter and unappealing. Overall Grade: B

Soul Proprietor – When Liam Nieson (sp?) is making a movie here this is his favorite restaurant. I can understand why. I don’t even like Seafood but if you come here for Crab Week or Crab Month or whatever the festival is they have some amazing dishes like the crab stuffed mushrooms. Baked Haddock is one of my favorite meals anywhere and about the only Seafood I ever order besides my annual order of Fried Clams (yep ONCE a year). Unfortunatly it was very fishy here which is a shock because this is a Seafood Restaurant. Like 111 the place is VERY loud. Overall Grade: B-

VIA TABLE – Just went here last Saturday night. I don’t love Italian Food, sorry. My wife (who is Italian) makes the best Meatballs I’ve ever had– and you better get out of the way when she makes a Lasagna because if you’re between me and it you’re going to get hurt. The last time I was here I ordered a pizza, and if you’ve been keeping up with MAN v PIZZA you’ll know I am not the world’s biggest pizza fan.

THIS time, we went on a Saturday night– it was very busy– it was very loud and despite having two servers there was some confusion. They never took our drink order, they asked us if we wanted water, brought over a bottle and then came for our food order. It wasn’t until after we’d ordered did I realize what had happened and by then we didn’t care. The bread order had to be put in twice, our request for a lid for the desert Gelato went unanswered and we had to go into the kitchen on our way out to get one– but as for food- my Father in Law orderd the Spaghetti and Meatballs (giant meatballs), my Mother in Law ordered Shrimp Scampi which looked very buttery and Veronica ordered Mushroom Fiori which I tried and it was excellent, although it was in a very heavy cream sauce which would have killed me. I got the Baked Haddock and it was exceptional. I had just had Baked Haddock on the Ocean a few days earlier and this was better. I think it was even better than what I usually get at HARRY’S out in Westboro– and that’s saying something. Overall Grade: A-