• reader review: real food daily thanksgiving take-out

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    November 27th, 2010quarrygirlLA restaurants, real food daily

    hey everyone! just a quick and straightforward holiday reader review from D, who got his thanksgiving meal at real food daily this year. he breaks it down for us in a simple and entertaining manner. listen up!

    Below are my pics and thoughts on this years RFD thanksgiving to go… for your amusement of course.

    For starters, picking up the food at my “specific time” took 45 minutes. That sucked royally during rush-hour traffic.

    Anyway, after an hour of cooking:
    We started with the soup which was awesome.
    The main plate of Faux Turkey, Stuffing, Mashed Potatoes, Yams, Veggies and Gravy all over it.

    Taste:

    Soup (Butternut swuash bisque) is a solid 4/5 awesome.
    The faux turkey was tasteless and crumbly, a 1/5.
    Stuffing: 2/5 (my traditional from scratch bread stuffing is better).
    The gravy was really good 4/5
    The mashed Potatoes (just like the Salsbury Setien ones) 3/5
    Yams were a little too bland, 2/5
    The cranberry relish was tasty, but tiny! 2/5
    the veggies were good, but they were just standard roasted veggies… nothing different. 2/5

    Desert was Pumpkin pie with soy whip (2/5) very bland and the crust tasted terrible.

    In the end:
    Price: 1/5
    Taste: 2/5
    Time needed to procure and make: 1/5

    Overall value: 1.5/5

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23 responses to “reader review: real food daily thanksgiving take-out” RSS icon

  • Yeah, that turkey/stuffing combo looks the same as their dinner special I had a few weeks ago, and it was nasty.

    Really sorry you had bad food, D.

  • I like it actually. Thought it was delish when I had it at the restaurant

  • Sounds like an awesome meal with lots of leftovers!

  • RFD is ridiculously overpriced , pretty dull if not nasty, and the icing on the cake is that the owners for the most part are not only not vegan , but also not vegetarians. Hypocrites!
    I would not ever spend a cent there again.

  • I’ve had this before.

    The turkey is a mushy consistency, because it’s very obviously mashed tofu.

    It’s also expensive for a meal that left me still hungry.

  • Gauri Radha गौरी राधा

    Thanks for the review!!

    I need to take advantage of more of the vegan take-out that’s available around town. We’re lucky to live in a place where we have all these options.

  • Damn. I own the RFD cook book which has the recipes for their faux turkey & some of the sides. I’m so glad I didn’t bust that out for my thanksgiving. When I looked at the ingredients for the “turkey” I thought wtf? It’s just tempeh and tofu with spices. Nothing outstanding. Lame. I’m so glad I went with my own instincts and did my own seitan roast from scratch. Fuck that place. Those motherfuckers once charged me $14 to add sauteed mushrooms to the brunch scrambles my bf and I ordered. The server didn’t even warn us about the charge. $14! That’s like the price of an entree! NEVER AGAIN.

  • I dunno about Leelee’s “icing on the cake”; what’s hypocritical omnis providing vegan food for vegans? I wish more omni restaurateurs would do it.

    Don’t get me wrong…there’s nothing good about bland food and inflated prices. But I don’t see it as any more “hypocritical” than straight people who support gay rights.

  • There’s good things in there (the walnut pâté), but I swear to god there’s NOTHING in that cookbook that takes anything less than overnight preparation. Something need to soak or marinate? Check? At least one obscure ingredient to track down? Check. And I hope you have a box grater to wear out, because it’s gonna be seeing A LOT of action.

  • I haven’t stepped foot in RFD since Chili Addiction opened next door. If I’m gonna drop 20 bucks per person, it might as well be impressive as all hell.

  • Gauri Radha गौरी राधा

    Fourteen dollars for extra mushrooms seems a bit excessive. I wonder why these places do things like this? Vegan customers like us are pretty faithful, if a vegan restaurant is just halfway passable and reliably free of animal-products, we’ll go back over and over. You’d think they would value that and not randomly overcharge like this. (I’m running my mouth off here but I’ve never been to this place by the way.)

  • OMG, I TOTALLY AGREE!!!!!!!!!! my guy and i were so disappointed after spending $90. it wasn’t great at all. the “turkey” was the worst. i will not be doing rfd’s thanksgiving again.

  • LeeLee:
    What is your source that gentry is not a veg. I had heard from good authority that she is.

  • Gentry may be but the stakeholders/other owners
    are not. Big meat eaters-just investors not interested in anything except $$$$$$$$.I know some of them personally & have watched as they chow down on beef & laugh at vegetarian ‘suckers’
    Phooey-like I said , overpriced & backed by hypocrites. I’d rather support other ventures.

  • I never liked RFD either.

    I had NATIVE FOODS Take out, and everything was
    delicious!

    The organization wasn’t quite good. They opened at 2 pm and required reservations. Nevertheless, the door was closed until 2:35 pm. And no one was checking for names. One simply had to make the line and pay at the front register… I wonder if they could sit everyone waiting, especially if all those people had made reservations…? It was a buffet dinner with no numbered tables…

    Luckily I wanted take out, and grabbed a bunch of food for a $29. Chef Tanya was even there cutting up that Wellington! The meal included a drink and dessert. The gave me 2 boxes to fill up as much as I could. I did meet other people at their house for dinner, but I swear my boyfriend and I had more than plenty to eat from this one person charge!

    And everything was rich and thanksgiving worth!

  • Hey if it’s good enough for Tobey Maguire it’s good enough for me. Pffft.

    Yeah, I would have to strike it rich to eat at that place on a regular basis. I’ve only been there for the brunch and it was good. The french toast was awesome, and they actually smoke their bacon as opposed to marinating it in liquid smoke. The hash browns were rad too, but the scramble I can top at home even on my worst day. In addition to the obscene mushroom charge (what does a portobello mushroom set you back these days? $2-3 a cap? I got maybe a third of one. I’m sure it wasn’t even organic) I also asked for a regular coffee and they served me a $4 americano instead. Clearly the servers don’t like to communicate.

    As for vegan establishments being run by non-vegans… I have to agree with the above. No way someone who doesn’t care enough about veganism to become one themselves is going to have our interest at heart. That’s why places like Green Leaves, Vegan House & Pure Luck fail at those veganocity tests. It really is about making money on the upcoming trend. Not about serving the best food with the best intentions.

  • @Gregalor

    P.S. I bought the book because I was curious about the rest of the menu that I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford! 😛

  • RFD has been getting a bit complacent and “bleh” in recent years….I go there occasionally – as I occasionally crave their “Burger w/ the works”, lentil pate, and the blackened tempeh on salads …but a few months ago I decided to try something different, and got the linguine alfredo…the pasta was undercooked and the sauce was watery liquid – not creamy or clingy at all. They offered to bring me some cashew cheese to mix into it to thicken it up a bit….it made it “OK”….and they fucking CHARGED me for the cheese sauce!!!! (They took it off the bill when I complained)

    BTW – if anyone’s craving a nice vegan alfredo pasta – check out Sante La Brea. Their vegan tofu-cream sauces are awesome.

  • I got the RFD Thanksgiving meal-to-go last year (2009) to bring to the big family celebration, but I’m not ever getting it again. I love the food at the restaurant, so I was disappointed that their Thanksgiving offering was so bland and unspectacular. I just picked at it, and didn’t even eat half of the dishes. So not worth the money. I went to Madeleine Bistro on Thanksgiving this year; food was superb and trounced RFD’s Thanksgiving offerings. Will stick with that tradition from now on!

  • I’ve been veg & vegan since the 1980s and the worst part of my chosen lifestyle is all the “holier than thou” vegans who convey such anger and contempt. Here we have one of the best vegan restaurants in the country and all you do is bitch about it. I don’t care what others do in their personal lives, the food is what it is, certified organic, vegan, with delicious authentic macrobiotic options. Frankly, I’m happy to support an independently owned operation that delivers this level of quality. After all, we get what we pay for in life. If you can’t afford it, cook at home. If you don’t appreciate it, say something constructive, and stop bitching and complaining about a place that goes out of its way to provide such a high quality organic vegan product.

  • I SO agree about Sante La Brea’s pasta! And I love being able to substitute rice noodles when ordering my favorite dish, the Sante Alfredo!

  • One of the things I don’t like about RFD is their cramped seating. We had the pleasure of dining at Pure Luck recently, which is even smaller than RFD, yet the seating was not cramped. Way to go, Pure Luck!

  • I can vouch for the fact that vegan restaurants run by non-vegan is precarious because they don’t put the same effort into it. Ann Gentry isn’t vegan. In and of itself that’s her own business, but it effects her decisions with regard to her restaurant.

    The years I worked at RFD she bought chicken sandwiches from the place next door and ate them sitting inside RFD, off of their “vegan” plates. (It was, at the time, advertised as an all vegan kitchen.) This was a good ten years ago while she was trying to get pregnant. I consistently found non-vegan ingredients and she always was good about changing which products she bought. (like butterscotch flavoring for cookies that had REAL butter, or the vanilla extract with dairy in it)

    But when I found the tortillas had whey, she said it was a mix up with the supplier and was temporary. I said we should send the case back and buy some tortillas from the Co-op on Broadway. She said no, people wanted the “flavored” tortillas and all they had at the Co-op was plain whole wheat. I said that people came for vegan food, they should get vegan food, so if we weren’t going to replace the tortillas, we needed to let the customers know that, for now, they had dairy. She said no, and when I brought up the liability of her serving them to someone who had an allergy (since in the past she had told me that veganism was “extreme”, I thought she might have more sympathy for an allergy). She said, “If people are that allergic they should grow their own vegetables and eat at home.” It broke my heart and I never went back.


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