S'ucks!

I've never been a big "food person," but I sure love macaroni and cheese. When I was a kid Mom used to make that famous Kraft dinner (in the blue box) with a tuna-fish white sauce she'd pour on top (sounds gross, but trust me it was the greatest thing ever) and I've never looked back. So when I read about this new "macaroni and cheese restaurant" in the East Village called S'mac I thought I'd finally found a place I could get excited about. Michael and I finally had dinner there Saturday evening and I'm sorry to say it was a major disappointment.

He had the traditional mac and cheese and I decided to be fun and get the cheeseburger version. The menu says it's "For the Hearty Meat Eater! Ground Beef done to perfection with onions, garlic and a hint of ketchup and mustard. Don't forget the best part -- a combination of American and Cheddar cheeses" yet when the two skillets came out, we couldn't even tell by looking at them which one was which. (It turns out the "cheeseburger" was sort of akin to calling Ragu meat sauce "meat sauce" -- it was more of a meat-flavored deal with a few tiny pieces buried in for effect than a mac and beef type of dish.) Now the lack of meat wouldn't have been a huge deal in and of itself (like I don't like plain old mac and cheese), but the noodles had this weird consistency -- like they'd been boiled too long and/or baked too long -- and there was seemingly no cheese at all. Sadly, Michael's was no better. Despite being hungry we both ended up leaving more than half our food behind (it really wasn't good).


If the food had been better I probably would have been willing to overlook the fact that the place is also a complete nightmare. There's no waitstaff so you just order at a counter, but there is no flow to it all. The restaurant is really small with only a handful of tables and bar stools, so you wind up standing around in everybody's way and by the time you see a table becoming open, one of the other 37 EV hipsters standing around has already snagged it (Michael nearly got into a scuffle with some chick). They'd do well to organize some type of system, however simplistic, although the first thing I'd worry about is the food.


Turns out the S in S'mac stands for Sarita's Macaroni and Cheese (she's a lovely Indian woman whom we met). Now I know I'm gonna get a lot of grief for saying this, but something tells me if the S had stood for Shaquanda instead, we would have been licking our plates clean ...