Cabanas
8500 Station Street
Mentor, Ohio 44060
440-255-0697
Awww sweet, Legacy is here tonight!
At the Copa, Copa Cabanas… That is one crappy song. Speaking of crappy music, I’d like to give a shout out to Legacy who happened to be playing the night Jason, Amanda and myself visited Cabanas. You guys got your plug, now shut the hell up! And let me give you a tip, when there are only 5 people in a restaurant there is no need to crank the shit out of your fancy music machines.
While they were playing, we could not talk to each other at the table, we just couldn’t. We had to give our orders by screaming them directly into our waitresses ear. She even told us that the management had asked them to tone it down, but they weren’t letting the man tell them how loud they could play their Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
As I had mentioned earlier the place was empty, but Jason and Amanda had visited Cabanas before and they both vouched for its food. Cabanas is located in the former home of the Blue Tip Grill down by the railroad tracks in Mentor off of 615.
To start our meal we ordered the loaded nachos ($8.50) with chicken and they were pretty stellar. The nachos were cooked fresh and although they used liquid cheese, it actually had quite a bit of flavor. When we ordered I thought that $8.50 might be a bit of a rip off, but the portion size was more than adequate for the three of us.
This is just a crappy photograph, the nachos were not day-glo orange.I had a bit of a predicament when it came time to order dinner because I really wanted seafood as my Fiance does not eat seafood, therefore neither do I. I pondered hard and long (heh) about getting either the Margarita Grouper or the Parmesan Tilapia, but the mussels caught my eye right before I ordered. I finally settled on the poor man’s Surf n’ Turf: mussels ($7.25) and the Island burger ($6.25).
The burger was great. Cooked perfectly medium which for some reason is a freakin’ rare occurrence whenever I eat. The Island Burger is topped with bacon and cheddar cheese, something I believe should be done to all meats. As you can see from this picture, the burger was huge and well worth the dinero.
This was a very fast moving burger, I was lucky to capture it this clearly.
What really blew me away was the mussels, there must have been 40 of them! What a great deal. Cabanas cooks their mussels with tomatoes, scallions and a garlic Parmesan butter sauce. They were ridiculously good, but unfortunately I don’t have a picture of them because someone (Jason) decided he was going to be Annie Leibovitz with his hamburger, killing the battery on my digital camera. I actually had to ask the waitress to bring me some bread so I could soak up some of that luxurious liquor. Amazing!
I do need to mention our waitress Holly, she was wicked awesome the entire night. She was polite and funny with us even when the band was making us deaf. She even went out of her way to get me that fore-mentioned bread and never charged me for it. You rock Holly!
Other than the 50 year-old guys that think they are in a real rock band, the experience at Cabanas was awesome. The food was excellent. I also felt it was a good value for the money and I will definitely be returning to Cabanas in Mentor.
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