Oops.  It helps if you actually cook the food in your buffet, and keep it nice and hot so that little critters don’t start growing in it.  But that wasn’t quite happening for the AA Buffet on Juan Tabo, who got a rare RED sticker on their health inspection after an eater complained of cold food.

“Inspectors said they found raw shrimp on the buffet, chicken not kept hot enough, improper sanitizing and soiled and moist cloths on the kitchen counters.”

I’m a huge fan of raw food – WHEN it is from a clean source and meant to be served raw.  That’s a big difference from a place like a buffet where dozens or  hundreds of people are looking for inexpensive belly-filling sustenance.

AA Buffet also serves sushi and oysters on the half shell – something I’d be pretty wary of, not only because their sanitation is in doubt, but because the source of the (non-oyster) fish is probably factory farms and East Asian shrimperies.  It’s hard to avoid, true, but when I *know* I can avoid meat of questionable origin, I still will do my best.

If asked to name the restaurant I would eat at for ever and ever and ever, I might actually choose one that I’ve yet to visit.  It’s tiny, it’s cramped, the owner is a jerk (sometimes), and if you don’t play by the rules you’ll find yourself wondering if you stumbled into the Seinfeld Soup Nazi episode.

Yes, my choice is Shopsins.

How can you argue – especially if you are the indecisive sort like myself – with a menu that offers hundreds of options though no substitutions are allowed; this ensures that no matter what you order at a meal you have plenty of other choices to pick from as the rest of your life transpires and you realize that choosing the absolute BEST restaurant you’ve ever enjoyed really would have been too limiting.  (And if it truly is the REST of your life, I expect sushi to be gone as a viable foodstuff in the next 10-20 years so that definitely leaves out all the great sushi joints.)

Now, a fabulous Japanese place, on the other hand… that could be pretty good.

Oh yeah, remember that talk we had about crappy restaurant websites?  Shopsins.com breaks the rules in that they are so unbelievably well-known that their website is free to be just a weird as it is.  But that’s in addition to the fact that they HAVE their address and phone number and hours in plain text right on the main page.  Thank you, Kenny Shopsin.

I Love Sushi has been on the “short list” of favorite Albuquerque sushi joints for years. They are friendly, easy to find, and the sushi is both decent-to-good and inexpensive.

Even the Alibi has been showering the love on them recently, which made me think I need to get back there for some house-cured saba. Yum.

Visiting their website I noticed it was vastly different than before, and upon first look it is pretty. Clean and brightly colored with menu navigation peppered throughout the flowering branches.

BUT. It is flash.  Complete with things that spin and optional sound effects.  Ick.  Truly pretty on the surface with all the depth of a mirage, unfortunately.

What does that mean? It means there is virtually no TEXT on the website. This is death for anyone needing to pull up the site on a smartphone or computer with slow internet. It also means searching for the site online could be dicey, as the search engines tend to utilize text content when building their pool of information.  This could be bad for SEO and people just being able to find the restaurant at all.

I recommend, for their sake, at least one of these changes:

1. Put the address and phone number in plain text on every single page.
2. Keep the same pretty scheme, but lose the flash in favor of a text-based navigation system, including the contents of the menu.

What happens when you are thinking of visiting a restaurant and you are just a little picky about what you eat?

You go to their website to look at the menu, of course.

But what if they have a page on their site that says, “We update our menu frequently, so CLICK HERE to see our latest menu”, and the menu link is from 2008?

Do you still go? Do you call them and ask them to update their site? Do you email them and threaten to boycott? Post a list of all offending restaurant sites to try to get them to sharpen up, or post a list of GOOD sites as motivation? Embark on a campaign of blogging about the problem?

I’m considering a few of these options – using my “evil powers” for good, as it were. I know a lot of non-picky eaters who could care less about the menu, but what if it were the HOURS of operation from 2008? That’s a bit more serious. Or a note that if your posted hours are until 5 but you close your kitchen at 4:30? In my mind, your “hours of operation” are the hours during which you will SEAT and SERVE any customer.

Your feedback is wanted – let’s make restaurant websites better!