The Crispy Gourmand: Rickey's World Famous Restaurant
8/15/2008 2:29 PM | 4 Comments | Page 2 of 3
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
Rickey's World Famous: Home of unidentifiable deep-fried shapes.
We returned to our barside perch just as our Seafood Sampler arrived. The Sampler featured Crab Cakes, Conch Fritters, Clam Strips, Hush Puppies and Fried Shrimp. Aside from the Clam Strips and Fried Shrimp, the rest of the Sampler's offerings were virtually indistinguishable from one another, in taste and appearance, leading us to conclude that a more appropriate name for these phantom items would be Deep Fried Balls of Something or Other.
As my colleague and I dined, more Floridians filed into Rickey's, including the one couple that seems to be ubiquitous in the Sunshine State: the man with the feathered, frosted hair wearing a muscle t-shirt, and his over-boobed, sun-wrinkled, cleavage-bearing partner. They parked themselves a few seats down from us and ordered a pair of pre-noon drafts.
Make no mistake: This was a formidable crowd, one that any Applebee's or Houlihan's would be proud to call their own for lunch on any weekday afternoon.
For our second course, my colleague and I again perused the tri-fold menu. We decided against ordering something called a Working Hot Dog ($4.95) (another reference to the restaurant's porn-haven past?) and instead realized that it was our duty as restaurant critics to roll up our sleeves, plant our elbows, and consume Rickey's
raison d'etre: the chicken wings.
Despite ending my 12-year-long streak of not eating chicken wings in public -- my no-ribs streak is still intact, thankfully -- we went ahead and ordered 20 wings from our waiter Troy: 10 Original and 10 Naked (yet another reference?) at the medium-heat level.
There is no other way to eat chicken wings than to regress to a more primal state. And regress we did. We tore at the wings with our teeth like mangy hyenas on the Serengeti tearing at an antelope's tendons, trying to ignore the big cartoonish chicken decals plastered everywhere around us. The chicken is Rickey's trademark. He's wild-eyed and has a smiling beak. He is holding out a plate of wings, as if to say, "Here! Have some of my friends! Enjoy! Ha-ha!"
As we ate -- looking as if, instead of eating the wings, we'd rubbed them over every inch of our faces, forehead to chin -- a baby at a nearby table began crying. Primus began playing on the restaurant's jukebox. The wing bones piled up in front of us. Our dining experience, we realized, was reaching a kind of crescendo.
