Critic's Review
Yet-Another bowl restaurant is now open in Fort Lauderdale. A fairly obvious Beehive clone; I wonder why someone would copy such a bad idea. I get the fast food pizza. But bowls of bad stuff? Seems misguided to me.
I arrived at precisely 2pm to a sparsely attended restaurant; the patronage here is largely female, because women are inexplicably obsessed with claiming that they "eat healthy".
They have menus at the door; there are 4 pre-configured bowls, or you can make your own. None of the pre-configured choices seem edible to me. Just too many non-complimentary items in a bowl. There was 1 indecisive girl in front of me, so I figured I'd pre-scope the food; to see what looked edible and what didn't. Unfortunately, the hot items were all covered.
The bases looked pretty lame; weeds or rice; I certainly wasn't getting the strawberry kale. Good grief. I opt'd for weeds and "Spanish" rice, which is really hispanic rice as it's certainly nothing you'd find in Spain. Your basic cilantro rice.
They wear gloves here to spoon the food into your bowl. Better safe than sorry.
Vegetables are a bunch of poorly contrived recipes; no normal food here. "Healthy" vegetables are simply steamed; this stuff is all "glazed" or dusted with some unwanted spice. I went with the roasted garlic rosemary broccoli; I would never put rosemary on broccoli but the other choices were worse.
They're using the Dan Quayle spelling for Potato.
For the protein I went with the "BBQ Pork", which was actually pulled pork. I thought about the "steak", but without knowing what kind of meat it was I passed on the upcharge item.
I asked for it in a takeout bowl as I wasn't going to eat the whole thing; but also asked for a tray. I wanted to sit in the corner but there was a laptop there; It's great when a manager takes one of the few good seats in the place. They have the same uncomfortable seating leftover from Pieology; when you buy a restaurant you have to get rid of the stuff that's wrong with it. I didn't want to sit at a low table so I sat at the community table. Luckily there were few customers.
My bowl was uninspiring. It was certainly a good portion of stuff for $7.99.
I looked at the bowl and wondered how I was going to eat this. Dry lettuce; their sauces here suck rocks; the "basil spinach pesto" I chose was junk; it didn't taste like pesto; it was more like a basil paste. Didn't go with anything in the dish.
I tasted a piece of broccoli; basically burned/raw. Clearly whoever made this 1) has no idea how to cook and 2) doesn't have the ability to realize that the finished product is inedible. If you can't pierce it with a plastic fork, it's not cooked.
I tasted the pork and it was dry and slightly sweet; I didn't really care for it.
I wasn't going to be able to eat this here. I'd have to do something with this pork to be able to eat it. And I can't eat dry lettuce, even with basil spinach paste. I went to the register, asked for a bag and packed up the bowl.
When I got home I deconstructed the bowl and determined that the broccoli couldn't be salvaged. Steaming burned broccoli won't make it edible.
The pile of rice underneath the stuff was underdone; not enough water in the pot when they made it. I don't like hard rice.
Rice is cheap so no need to re-purpose this. Right into the garbage can.
I braised the pork in some chicken broth to make it edible, but overall this bowl was a total loser.
Conclusion
I wasn't going to try this place, but there's a shortage of places to try. When you can't find one thing on the menu you want to order, you have a problem. And I don't want to have to choose stuff that I don't want just because the contrived recipes fit together. I don't want BBQ pork with citrus quinoa, for example, or sweet potato noodles with tuna.
While I also despise Beehive, at least the bad recipes were properly prepared. Here, everything was poorly made and virtually inedible.
These bowl restaurants are designed to be run by minimum wage workers, but in order to pull that off you have to have bulletproof procedures for cooking the food. The "cooks" here ruined the food; and aren't even food-savy enough to know that what they're producing is trash.
Bad location, bad parking lot, bad food, bad idea.
There's nothing unhealthy about pizza. It's cheese bread and tomatoes; just a better tasting version of what you get in a bowl. If you think I can't make a steak with vegetables thats light years better than this then you'd be wrong.
How can you explain this person? The review has pictures of the entire experience; you can see the food and the restaurant. So how could any brain, no matter how undeveloped, think this was a fake review written before the restaurant opened?
I promise you the place sucks. If you like it then perhaps your pop tart lifestyle is the reason?