Perpetual Smile

I recently received a gift certificate for one of ten local restaurants from someone who really liked some work I did for them.

I like food, but I’m not a foodie. I don’t really visit any of our local restaurants because I already have my favorite franchises. I mean, yeah, I love Frankie’s (which is the best hot dog franchise in Connecticut and now Florida), but it’s not like I go out of my way to go to any of our other restaurants. Waterbury doesn’t really have any of its own local “flavor” that other towns have — at least, I don’t think so.

But I’m not one to turn down a free meal, especially not when it meant a night out alone with Mike.

Initially, I asked him what he was in the mood for, because I didn’t really care. He wanted Tuscan-style food, and most of our restaurant choices were Italian. The more I thought about it, though, the less I wanted Italian. I mean, I eat Italian food at home all the time, and I also eat it when I go to my aunt’s, which is pretty often. Our only other choices were a Tex-Mex restaurant, or an American/European restaurant. The latter’s website didn’t have a menu. I was suddenly really homesick for Deerfield Beach and the Tex-Mex food down there, so I decided to give the Waterbury version a shot.

Crossroads Cantina is a restaurant tucked in the industrial section of downtown. It’s a little offset from the main road, hidden behind what looks like a warehouse and a maze of highway on-ramps and exits. It was pretty quiet outside, but as soon as we entered the automatic doors we were blasted with chatter and loud music. It became very clear very quickly that I wasn’t going to get the private atmosphere that I had daydreamed about all day.

Still, free dinner is free dinner, and I was pretty hungry. Our waitress seated us and let us know that she was new. “I’m probably going to suck,” she told us. She reminded me a little of Lauren, my younger sister. She was about Lauren’s age — maybe younger — and she was really friendly.

She took our order — which took a while because we had a few questions and she had to run back and forth to ask someone else when she didn’t know some of the answers, and Mike always takes a long time to order anyway — and then brought us tortilla chips and salsa. The chips were pretty good, if not a little greasy. The salsa was deliciously spicy but sort of reminded me of the stuff you could buy in the store. According to the menu, both were housemade every morning.

They were pretty busy, which is probably why it took so long for both our appetizer and our entrees to come out. But when Mike tried to cut his chicken breast with a fork and, unable to do it, asked a passing waitress for a knife, he got a butter knife. We had a good laugh over it, but he still had a hard time getting his meat cut.

The rice that came with my quesadilla was dry, and the quesadilla itself didn’t have much chicken or cheese in it. I like the quesadillas at 99 — a franchise restaurant in our city — a lot better.

I came to the conclusion that Crossroads probably gets its reputation because it’s the only Tex-Mex in town and because most of the people that go there come to drink and are probably too drunk to notice that the food isn’t totally stellar.

Still, our waitress was friendly and she did pretty good, considering it was only her third night and her first night with the place packed. I tipped her pretty well, though I’m probably biased since she reminded me of my little sister.

Mike and I compared notes on the ride home, and passed one of the restaurants we could have gone to.

“We would have probably got our food faster if we’d gone there,” he said. “We probably would have been outta there an hour ago.”

“True,” I said, feeling a little guilty for talking him out of Italian.

He took a right when our light turned green. “Ya can’t knock free food, though.”