Not at All as Yummy as Advertised

One thing that I found weird when talking with people in Dublin, Ireland, was that when you asked them about their local cuisine, more often than not they would say, “well, we don’t really have our own cuisine. The English made sure of that.” It’s strange since, here in America, we tend to associate a number of dishes with Ireland, such as Irish stew (root vegetables stewed with lamb or mutton), or corned beef and cabbage (which actually isn’t Irish at all), and, of course, potatoes. By and large, though, the Irish don’t really seem to consider any of that their “cuisine”. It may just be that certain dishes we think of as “Irish” are just so mundane that they don’t think of them as such.

Whatever the case, whenever you actually ask about what cuisine they do like, they end up coming up with weird things that don’t sound Irish at all. One item that came up regularly was the “spice bag”, a portion of chips (aka fries here in America) with (what we would consider) non-traditional toppings, like stir fried asian chicken and veggies, plus spicy sauce. When I described this to a Dublin native as “like a walking taco” or “like poutine”, they gave me a really confused look. But be that as it may, the Irish really do like taking odd ingredients and dumping them onto their fries.

We also ran into this when wandering around with an actual native Dubliner that my wife and I have been friends with for a while. We hung out with them for a day in the city and when we said, “hey, what’s a good place to go for lunch,” they seemed confused by the question. We didn’t even ask for good local cuisine, just good food. They ended up wandering for a while, with us in tow, just looking at places, seeming as confused as we were about the whole thing. But then we ended up settling at Mr. Yummy, which (unsurprisingly) had fries covered in stuff, and they said, “let’s try here.”

The problem with Mr. Yummy was that it wasn’t, in fact, yummy. I would hazard to go so far as to call it “pretty gross”. The food on offer was all pretty basic; it’s the kind of fare you’d expect to get in any fast food restaurant in the States, except maybe with the fact that this place served it all, and then some. This menu features wraps, tacos, loaded fries, wings, chicken sandwiches, burgers, pizzas, pasta… really, if you could find it at any fast joint in the U.S. (McDonalds, Wendy’s, Pizza Hunt, Fazoli’s, et al) then it was served at Mr. Yummy.

Upside, that’s a huge variety of food, so just about anyone could likely find something that would interest them on the menu. There’s an obvious downside, though: the wider the breadth of a menu, the more likely it is that everything on that menu will be crappy. Think of it like a jack-of-all-trades situation: proficient at everything, master of none. At a basic, technical level I wouldn’t call anything the restaurant made truly awful. What items the group got – a wrap (which I didn’t sample), a chicken sandwich, and some loaded fries – were all at least made well enough they could be identified and appeared to be food (which, really, is a very low bar for a restaurant). But when it came to flavor, the food utterly failed on every front.

Of the two items I sampled, I would say that the loaded fries that my wife purchased were the better choice. She ordered the Chicken Fries which (unlike the Burger King Chicken Fries, which are actually chicken pieces formed like fries) were potato fries loaded up with fried chicken pieces, cheese sauce, and the restaurant’s special “yummy sauce”. This item speaks directly to the fact that the food is, at best, competent. The fries were fine, not especially crispy but not cold. The chicken pieces were thickly breaded and fairly salty, but they were also a bit dry. Both fries and chicken were perked up by the cheese sauce (which was perfectly acceptable) and yummy sauce (which was cloyingly sweet) and it all came together for a cup of heavily sauced food which was edible but not especially great.

Still, the fries were better than what I ordered. I picked out the Zinger chicken sandwich, which was a chicken fillet served with lettuce, cheddar cheese, and yummy sauce. I assumed (incorrectly, as it turned out) from the name that the Zinger would have some kind of zing to it. Spice or flavor or something. But no, it was just a plain, heavily breaded chicken cutlet (which was exceptionally dry) topped with a thin leaf of lettuce, and some cheese and sauce. And that sauce was just so foul.

The yummy sauce is some variation on Yum-Yum sauce that you get with hibachi. It’s a sweet mayo sauce that is good when contrasted with the soy sauce on sauteed veggies and maybe some extra hibachi sauce you dip with on the side. It needs salt and umami to develop its proper flavor, and Yum-Yum sauce can be great when it’s served in the right context. Mr. Yummy, though, puts it on everything even when the flavors of the dish don’t accent the sauce very well. In this case, that cloying sweetness on my sandwich wasn’t balanced out by the breading or salt on the chicken, and it totally drowned out the flavor of the cheese. It was disgusting, and I barely ate more than half of my sandwich despite being hungry.

Now in fairness to the restaurant our friend did like their wrap. They got a Happy wrap (ground beef, Turkish sujuk, cheese sauce, fries, yummy sauce), and ate the whole thing. They said it was “pretty good”, but they also didn’t seem like they’d remember the place or come back for this wrap again. Effectively, take their “pretty good” with at least a little salt (probably from the heavily breaded chicken). It looked fine… but then at first glance so does all the rest of the food served at Mr. Yummy, even when it’s all far from fine.

I think the big issue that the restaurant has is they’re trying to do too much all at once. If they focused on just a couple of specific styles of food, like wraps and tacos, or chicken and wings, they could have a nice, focused menu with items that tasted really good. Instead it seems like they want to do everything (maybe because they’re a halal restaurant and they want to give their halal eaters every option they can) and they end up doing nothing well… and then to cover for it they pour yummy sauce on everything, as if they can mask how bad the food is.

I wish the food was good. There were enough items on the menu that seemed interesting in the right context that a good place serving good versions of this menu would be fantastic. That place, though, is not Mr. Yummy. The food was so bad that my wife talked about it for days afterwards. The restaurant was certainly memorable, but not for any reason Mr. Yummy would have preferred.