I went west to Buckeye AZ and desired to to try some of the amazing sounding food I read about on-line from The Vic Bar and Grill. The Cuisine is New American and is Farm to Table Style so it should be Great! All the sauces and baked goods are made in house. What’s not to like about that!

Upon arrival I gasp at the breathtaking view. I also gasp at the abbreviated menu with few choices unlike the menu I read on-line. We drove around an hour to come here and there are few choices to eat.

I heard that the Chef has worked at prestigious places and has also worked under Restauranteur and Celebrity Chef Colicchio  who is one of the Judges from the Bravo TV Show Top Chef so I thought the food would be pretty darn good.

We decided to start with a few appetizers. The first was a local Blue Sky Farm Duck Deviled Egg.

The egg came from a very tiny duck because it looked hen egg sized. We share the egg and it’s filled with runny and lumpy yolk filling that isn’t flavored so well. I wasn’t sure what the egg was sitting on so I tried some very rubbery unseasoned egg whites. I guess I wasn’t suppose to eat them and possibly they were just used to stand the forking egg up. A mild red sauce topped the egg. My stomach sort of turned after I tried a chopped white and I had reason to worry about the rest of the food after trying this.

We also shared the Seared Shishito Peppers.

The peppers were covered with a sweetened Soy based sauce. They were suppose to come with Blueberry Sugar. The sugar might have been in the sauce.

I ordered the Melon Salad for my Lunch.

It was ripe… aromatic….. flavorful…. and delicious made with, Galia Melon, preserved lemon, micro mint leaves, lavender and goat cheese. It had all kinds of flavors going on that were very right like the lemony preserved lemons brightening everything up. The salad was suppose to also have radish flowers that were missed. Shame because it would have looked amazing with the flowers. This salad was really delicious and is something that inspires me to recreate.

However the Guanciale with the salad was cold and greasy and seemed like it was straight out of the refrigerator.

I do have a hard time thinking of this dish as a salad. It was really more of an appetizer and wasn’t much food. I was still hungry. I didn’t appreciate my server’s sense of humor. He said to me, “You ate all that.” I felt like forking slapping him at that time.

My husband had the Smokie.

My photo doesn’t do a good job of showing you how awkward this sandwich is too eat. It has to be eaten with a knife and fork. Everything on the plate was made in house. The roll the sauces and the sausage. I didn’t try it but my husband said the meat was packed very hard and was grind very fine. He said it felt weird in his mouth.

I do know that this restaurant doesn’t grind their own meat and sends the meat out for someone else to grind. I was going to order the all sirloin hamburger until the waiter told me that. Grinders often don’t get cleaned between grindings and you don’t know what was left behind.

I had room for dessert so I was hoping that the desserts would be delicious. Our waiter suggest two of the six desserts on the menu so I go with one of his choices and it was the Strawberry and Lemon Icebox Cake.

I thought it would be delicious and lemony but it was a thickened Whipped Cream Pie with strawberries on the plate. For the kind of upscale restaurant I thought this was I have to say this pie looks very much like something you’d see at a school or church bake sale and not something a Pastry Chef would create. The gram cracker crust had an added flavor that might have been maple. The pie part was just thickened whipped cream with little flavor of any kind and was topped with more cream that didn’t remind me of real cream.

I took my first bite and I have to pull something from my mouth.

It seemed like a forking piece of SILICON GLUE. It was hard and also like elastic. It was just like silicon.

I showed the waiter and he ran it to the kitchen. He just said it must be some gelatin. I didn’t even get an I’m sorry or anything…..It seemed like they thought that an imbedded object was perfectly fine in a pie they serve.

I had a hard time trying out the dessert after that because my stomach was turning again.

I understand why some people have an aversion to sweets.

This one was awful. The crust was greasy gram cracker with with some sort of flavoring that tasted like maple. The creamy filling was not smooth without a great mouth feel and was sort of gritty and lacked that really perfect lemon flavor I imagined. It was not something I’d ever want to try again.

If you eat with your eyes you will do better than I did because your stomach won’t feel a thing!

It’s not my intention to write a negative review for the Vic Bar and Kitchen. Your visit might differ. For all I know the Chef or Management might have been on vacation and it is possible the third string workers were holding the place together.

For more information of The Vic Bar and Kitchen please visit www.VicBarandKitchen.com