Just came back from PJ's today which is close by work and I have been hearing all the great things about it from Yelp and other people, so I thought today is the day. I had high expectations, which usually results in either 1 or 2 ways: expectations met and exceeded or expectations spectacularly not met. Today it was the latter of the 2, and I shall explain why. I will throw in this caveat that after reading some people may say or think "you should have asked the price of the extras before you ordered them, maybe you should have asked for sauce to be put on beforehand", yes I should have, though no where on the menu was a price given so I would have expected a courteous heads up from the person taking the orders what the price of the extra I wanted was.
Now I have been ordering food from takeout places for some time (maybe 15 years) and over this time I have seen the price rise for an extra rise from essentially free, to an average price of around $0.50-$2 depending on the type of extra. If lets say I want extra avocado, then its normally in the $1 range, extra meat will be $2-$4 and things like cheese, tomato, pickles, mushrooms etc will be priced at the reasonable $0.50 per item.
So here I am, ordering my Triple Cheesesteak, I ask for extra mushrooms to be thrown in along with a side serving of onion rings. At the current rate according to Woolworths, the price per kilogram of mushrooms are $10.98/Kg, I estimate they put about 20-30g of mushrooms on my Triple Cheesesteak which is the equivalent to the price of $0.33(0.03*10.98). Add in the time taken ( 0.5 minutes = 0.0083 hours) to place mushrooms on grill with the steak and the time it took to chop said mushrooms at the going hour rate of $18-$19 an hour, this is equal to a whopping average cost of $0.157 (0.0083*19). I wont go into the per gram cost of transportation and storage of mushrooms.
So as I said before an average cost of around $0.50. They obviously want to make some profit on this so let say add 100% on top and make the extra mushrooms cost $1. I can live with that. After paying and and receiving the receipt, you can image the feeling of betrayal and slight annoyance that they had the gall to charge $2.20 for a minuscule amount of fungus. I thought to myself "maybe these will be the greatest mushrooms I have ever had, maybe these will be why everyone has been raving about this joint". With that thought in mind, I started eyeing off the choices in sauces to squirt onto this: Smokey BBQ, American mustard, tomato sauce and some others. I had my eye on the Smokey BBQ. I forgot to mention that I ordered take-away. So when my order was ready and I was licking my lips at the thought of squirting this sauce all over my cheesesteak, I was once again betrayed and let down by the fact that they wrapped my cheesesteak up in what looked like a good few metres of paper. How the hell am I going to put this smokey BBQ sauce all over it now without creating some kind of scene reminiscent of Christmas day at Great Grandma Olives house. There was no way, I was beat, defeated by mushrooms, crushed by the expectations of the smokey BBQ sauce, eviscerated by wrapping paper. With my head hung low, I trudge on back to work in 35 degree heat thinking of all the other places I could have gone.
The food was pretty average too by the way, not sure if I will come back here. read more