Tio Pepe (MD - Baltimore)

Restaurants like Tio Pepe are the reason that Baltimore has long been a culinary brown field. They serve average food at outrageous prices with poor service and live well beyond their life expectancy because a certain crowd likes to go there to see and be seen.

[See also: Peerce's Plantation, Linwood's, Kawasaki, Brass Elephant, Da Mimmo (anyone who thinks that Mimmo can hold a candle to Boccaccio should be tossed in the Inner Harbor without a tetanus shot)]

Don't get me wrong - growing up in Baltimore, I loved Tio's. We went for birthdays, anniversaries, etc. Hell, I even went there to celebrate my high school graduation. If you have never left Baltimore County, sangria sounds "exotic," rude Dominican waiters appear "Spanish" and being seated 30 minutes after your reservation looks more "in demand" than disorganized.

After years of declining views of the place, I gave it one last try and came away more disappointed than ever. Our party of eight ordered a dizzying array of dishes, but I was able to sample: gambas, crema Escorial, Dover sole, veal Sevillana and the pine nut roll.

Gambas al ajillo
In Andalucía this is a magnificent, simple dish. You bring a cazuela of olive oil up to temperature, then toss in thinly sliced garlic, spicy red peppers and raw shrimp and remove it fro the heat. The three new ingredients boil in the oil and cook to perfection in front of you while you stare at it - bursting at the seams with anticipation - wondering how soon is too soon to begin dredging bread through the seasoned oil. Jump too soon and you burn your mouth - badly, I might add.

Anyway, the folks at Tio's have managed to take what was an elegant, peasant dish and destroy it. Their version is a few rubbery shrimp swimming in a bowl of dark brown gravy punctuated with minced garlic. This is closer to the gravy that accompanies Egg Foo Yong than anything Spanish.

Crema Escorial
I was intrigued by this dish. It was advertised on the menu as a sherry and cream based seafood soup. The red herring here is the name - in particular, the use of the word, "Escorial."

Escorial is a town approximately 40km north west of Madrid and houses a summer palace for the Spanish royal family, a monastery and a mausoleum for Spanish kings. What the hell does a landlocked town that hosts a summer palace have to do with a seafood soup? Nothing. As with everything else at Tio Pepe, they have draped an exotic, Spanish sounding name across an otherwise unrelated dish and hoodwinked Baltimoreans into paying through the nose.

Naming conventions aside, this was a thick bowl of sherry-scented cream with very few pieces of seafood in it. A total disappointment.

Dover Sole
If ever there were an argument that people can be tricked into eating mediocre food through theatrics, this is it. Forget bananas foster and tableside Caesar salad - this has them both beaten by a mile.

The sole arrives on a piping hot platter and is then filleted tableside by a waiter using nothing more than two spoons to completely de-bone the fish. Everyone drops what they are doing and oohs and aahs over it - staring in amazement at the waiter’s mastery of the spoons. When he is done, he makes a very big show of plating the fish and accompanying vegetables and generally gets rewarded with applause.

Here is the rub. From the time the fish has left the oven, it has sat on the line under heat lamps (don't even try to tell me Tio's doesn't use heat lamps - my "Crema Escorial" had a hard baked skin on top of it), then carted through the dining room, sat for another five minutes while it is de-boned, then finally plated and presented for consumption. The result is an over-cooked piece of fish that is cold to the touch. Gross. But OH MY GOD - did you see him remove the bones with a spoon? AMAZING!

Veal Sevillana
As the quality at Tio's has waned, this has been the lone standout. Veal cutlets, lightly breaded and fried, served in a sherry-based brown sauce with liberal amounts of green olives. You might actually find a dish that resembles this in some restaurants in Sevilla. Unfortunately, this too has finally met its maker. The veal was the consistency of shoe leather and the once appetizing sauce - light, perfumed with sherry - is little more than SYSCO beef gravy. So sad.

Dessert was and still is the high point of the meal at Tio's. Their pine nut roll is a classic. This is a yellow cake roll with cream filling and topped with toasted pine nuts. The cream looked more orange than I remember it being in years past, but the flavor is still there. Paired with an espresso, it is the only way to end a meal there (though I seriously recommend you avoid the place altogether).