8.18.2008

Adventure 30: Cabana Room

Cabana Room (website)
240 W. Gilman St.
3 Adjectives: elegant, bland, boring.
Price: app (3-10) entree (6-9)
Authenticity:
Atmosphere:
Overall:
Other Opinions: madisonatoz, yelp, tripadvisor...
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Given its wonderful upstairs sister restaurant, Samba, I thought the Cabana Room would be a wonderful lounge-like restaurant with tasty food and a fine atmosphere. The atmosphere it has, the food it doesn't.

After walking into the double doors of Samba on the ground floor, I was greeted by a similarly darkly lit and designed lounge as Samba. The prospects were nice: I thought I was going to enjoy the food at this place given the chic food descriptions on the menu and the fancy design.

However, despite the elegantly presented food and the nice atmosphere, the taste of everything was bland or unworthy of the price. Compounding on the problem was that the food took a very long time to come out, so we were already harboring great expectations for what was going to be presented to us.

For an appetizer, I had the zesty tomato soup, which suspiciously tasted like it came out of a Campbell soup can (this was completely appalling since I had the amazing tomato soup at Eno Vino recently). As a main course, I ordered the Cabana burger, which looked very fancy and potentially delicious, but ended up being a giant hard chunk of meat (definitely not cooked medium rare) dressed with toppings that were not good enough to save it. I realized at this point I could have gotten a much tastier burger at Five Guys for half the price. My friend received a cruler fate. His Portuguese sausage with peppers panini-like sandwich (which I noticed is thankfully no longer on the menu) was nearly frozen in the interior. After telling our waitress, she brought the same sandwich back - complete with missing bite - over twenty minutes later (now heated), yet we were in no way compensated for this like every other restaurant I have been to - very unclassy.

Given the service at the Cabana room and the lackluster food, I would not recommend the restaurant to anyone. If you want to go classy, you might as well save up and go to Samba. Else, there are plenty of similarly priced nice restaurants around the area such as Sunroom Cafe.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Any sandwich place that serves any premade/frozen sandwiches deserves to be shunned. Atlanta Bread has just recently been put on this list. What is it with cheap-ass panini?

Too bad; I'd been looking forward to trying Cabana Room. Glad I can keep Samba on the list.

Anonymous said...

Don't scratch them off the list yet - they have lost their summer help. The stews, salads and traditional Brazilian dishes are all excellent. You can't knock them until you try them one more time.

If you want to knock a restaurant after one visit in August, when most staffs are turning over, then go to Five Guys and eat the cheeseburger there.

Kyle, I expect better of you. Try them or at least read some other reviews before you give up on them!

Unknown said...

This is one of those unpardonable sins of laziness. You're a sandwich spot, more or less, and yet can't find the time to make a sandwich? Something tells me the frozen panino has nothing to do with staff turnover.

I have read other reviews. You're right. I shouldn't completely scratch them off the list. But my expectations, should I make it there, will be significantly diminished for this review. There's just no excuse for a premade sandwich at a sandwich spot.