As a lot of my friends know, I made a goal at the start of 2015 to go to a new restaurant every week of the year. That meant I would have to find 52 new Restaurants to try. It is only mid December and I have hit 58 new places. A summary will occur after I talk about the latest.
My latest new Restaurant was a Mexican Restaurant called La Marimba located in Rockledge Florida. I went there for lunch after hearing about the place from some of my Facebook friends. I took a picture of the outside.
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| La Marimba Cocina Mexicana |
As you enter the place, there is a hostess stand and a bar just to the left. The dining room is made up of both booths and tables. I am pretty sure this use to be a Barbecue place because it reminded me of Sonnys, or Fat Boys, or any of the many chains that use to swamp Brevard County. The bar seemed cozy and there was a TV playing. My only complaint about lunch was that Dr. Phil was on the TV. I would rather watch a soap opera. They brought a basket of chips, an empty bowl and a small carafe of very good salsa.
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| The bar at La Marimba |
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| Salsa, chips and Dos Equis Amber draft |
I ordered a chicken enchilada and hard beef taco. An typical order when I am trying a new Mexican Restaurant. I like to see how they do their chicken and beef. Both were very good and moist and tasteful (I mean they use some spices.) It was served with beans and rice, but they asked you whether you wanted refried or black beans. I choose the refried.
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| Beef Taco, Chicken Enchilada |
My friend Winnie told me that the fish tacos are really great. I know I will be back to try another meal. I give the place a 3 (great) and I will try the fish or shrimp tacos next time.
So this place was the 58th new restaurant of the year. Below you will find a pie chart of the type of Restaurants I went to in 2015. Categorizing a place is an art-form I am still working on. There are so many places that cross cultures, making it hard to put them in a single category. I am sure that some of the ones here could have been done differently. The good thing, I seem to have reached a variety of different cuisines. Of course, American led the way with Seafood and Mexican coming in as my second favorite type. There may be a personal bias but also what was available and new may have skewed the results.
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| New Restaurants by Type of food served. |
I did get to travel some this year, so I have included a pie chart by where the places were. Of course, I live in Florida so most were from Florida. While I spent 10 days in Ecuador, I was on a boat so it was hard to Restaurant hop in the Galapagos when no one lives on most of the islands. I was only in St John for seven days, but took advantage of trying new places while there. Most of the places I go when visiting Vermont are the restaurants I know I like. I did get to visit a cool Vietnamese Restaurant in Burlington with my nephew Josh and brother John.
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| New Restaurants by State/Country |
Part of my visits to new restaurants was to score them for future reference. My scale is from 0 to 5 where the low end (0 and 1) would be restaurants I would probably never go back to. A 5 would be the ultimate place to go. I have included a bar chart of my scores.
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| New Restaurant Scores |
As you can see, I never gave a restaurant a 0 or 1, but I also never gave a restaurant a five. There were sixteen goods (2), thirty greats (3) and twelve excellents (4). My simple conclusion is that if the place was a low score, I probably already knew that or it looked too scary to go into, so I would not try it. There are too many good or better restaurants to be wasting my time eating at bad places. Why no fives though? Probably because in my retirement, I am too lazy to dress up and also find a date for the places that are worthy of the highest score. I am not going to the Fat Snook by myself...
For information purposes, I have included the restaurants that did score a four. The Ocean Grill in Vero Beach was almost a five but I had gone for lunch. I think dinner would have been a five. I went there with my friend Nancy and she made me dress up (i.e. not wear flip-flops).
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| New Restaurants that were scored as Excellent |
I hope you enjoyed my adventure. I think in 2016 I am going to seek out people to go with me so I can try some of the fancier places in Brevard and the World. Let me know if you would like to go. My email is bj.provoncha@gmail.com
I wanted to include a picture I pulled off the internet of my nephew Israel. He likes to do re-enactments and this was, I thought, a great picture...
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| Izzy, on knee, closest to photographer |
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