Bruce Ishikawa

Review of Longfellow's Wayside Inn

Abused Food in a Truly Historic Setting

Abused Food in a Truly Historic Setting

We knew what we were in for when the waitress finally put a dish of Pepperidge Farm crackers and cheddar cheese spread on the table to get us started on our worst meal of 2018.

The Wayside Inn is 302 years old. The dining room looks all original, though the uncomfortable chairs are probably only about 70 years old. The place has a real colonial feel on the old Boston Post Road in Sudbury. When we walked in, the room was packed with old, wealthy white people. The food is clearly tailored for the bland, disinterested palate.

We started with lobster bisque and Cesar salads. The soup lacked salt and had no lobster flavor. The salads featured shaved strips of flavorless parmesan that closely resembled candle wax. No cheese tang at all. The dressing was out of a bottle, without anchovies, of course. And of course, no fresh ground pepper (note: pepper was very expensive in 1716, maybe they were sticking with the theme).

For entrees, we had an overdone, tough prime rib; a seafood sampler which consisted of four rubbery shrimp and three flavorless scallops; and dry, overcooked goose which was tough and stringy. Accompaniments were Delmonico potatoes with not enough cheese and some fresh green beans that had been boiled well past their death. These all started out as fine ingredients: prime beef, goose, shrimp and scallops from the nearby ocean, fresh green beans. But they were cooked to death with no salt or any attempt to capture or impart flavor. What a waste of food and energy!

The Inn's signature dessert, baked Indian (sic) pudding was sweet, molasses-ey and good, although it took two tries: the server offered to top it with ice cream or whipped cream. We asked for whipped, got ice and she had to redo. Service was pretty bad all around. An untrained 20 year old was in charge of neglecting our table, which she did quite thoroughly. She asked if we "were still working on that" which for once was a legitimate question: it was very laborious to get enough nourishment into our bodies from the dead stuff on our plate.

We left the place thoroughly disappointed at our last dinner out of 2018.