Lehigh Valley Restaurant

Tom:

By now, you can tell there's no real rhyme or reason to our selection scheme to eat at restaurants. So far we've been generating 5 random numbers that correspond to numbers on our list of restaurants, and picking the restaurant that makes the most sense out of those. Hence, the Lehigh Valley Restaurant, which I always thought was just a bar that served hamburgers or something, I don't know.

When Sam, special guest Danny Abowd and I came through the front doors to see a bar with 4 tables and Family Guy playing in the background, I thought my suspicions were confirmed. The waiter (who Sam and Danny figured out had some kind of High School connection to them) then asked us if we were there to drink or for food. We said food, and he promptly took us back into a much larger room filled with tables, which was an actual restaurant. Like, with menus.

(We were pleasantly surprised with the pretty-ok looking dining room)

The restaurant wasn't very crowded (as seen above), so we were served pretty quickly by the same waiter, who was the only person working in the restaurant best we could tell. I ordered a main course of toasted ravioli, which intrigued me since I'd only ever seen it as an appetizer. Sam got a cheeseburger, and Danny got a steak. "I'll be right back with some bread and your onion rings," the waiter said as he left the table. We spent the next 5 minutes sitting in a confused daze wondering if we had ordered onion rings or not, wondering if it could really be possible that a restaurant was just gonna give us some free onion rings. Sure enough, there they were sitting on a small plate with our bread, and they didn't show up on the check.

(Lehigh's signature; free onion rings)

Sam:

So it turns out that Lehigh, if famous for nothing else, is known for giving out free onion rings before their meals which none of us knew beforehand. The onion rings, while free, were not the best onion rings i've ever had but were definitely not bad (and free). Pretty quickly after the OR's and the bread came out all of our entrees arrived. We were each presented with the following:

(Tommy's ravioli)

(Danny's steak)

(My burger)

The food all looked pretty good and tasted about the same. I wouldn't say that it was the best burger i've eaten in ithaca but it was alright. Tommy said his ravioli was ok and Danny, despite just having had his wisdom teeth removed, seemed to muscle through his steak.

(Danny icing his pain like he's some sort of athlete from ESPN)

Overall I would describe our experience at the LVR as fine. This is not a restaurant that we were looking forward to eating at, and definitely not one that we would have picked outside of the context of this blog but we ended up being ok with it! Prices and portions were fine despite the reviews that we read online and the service was great. Hopefully we can have more surprises like this with some of the other restaurants that we're dreading going to.