While the nation celebrates the inauguration of Barack Obama, our first African American president, we too have a (much less momentous) beginning to celebrate.
Welcome to MicroGrub.com, a new blog on lunch spots in the Redmond area. As folks who’ve “enjoyed” Eurest for a few years, we’ve decided it’s time to the explore non-cafeteria options the East Side has to offer. Now that’s “Change We Can Believe In!” While we’ve hit up many of the obvious choices – Mayuri’s, Bento Box, Malay Satay Hut and Red Robin, we also know there are many hole in the wall places spread across the parking lots and strip malls of the corporate suburban wasteland. In the past, we’ve looked over such options for the sure bets. But no longer! In the process, we’ll post our experiences here, distilling the wheat from the chaff, allowing you to follow in our path, choosing only the diamonds in the rough. Hopefully we can execute more fluently than a chief justice administering the presidential oath.
To maintain some consistency we’ve established the following rating system:
O.G.F. (out of 5): The overall goodness factor. Our overall recommendation for a restaurant.
Taste (out of 5): the yumminess quotient
Price (out of 5): The value per dollar. 1 for expensive, crappy food; 5 for delicious and cheap (3 could mean cheap but bad or expensive but decent – we’ll provide explanation if necessary)
Quantity: Too little, Doggie bag or Just right
Wait time: the number of minutes from walking in the door until food is on your plate.
Rotation: the number of days a week we could imagine eating there. It should be rare to see more than a 1 in this slot. The more variety in the menu, and the better the food, the higher this will go with 5 meaning that we think eating at the restaurant Monday through Friday for every lunch would be a viable option (we don’t expect to see this, but who knows?).
% MSFT employees: We’ll lump this into 25% or less, half, 75% or more and “close to 100%” to indicate our sense of what percent of the other diners are from Microsoft.
Parking: Easy, Reasonable, Difficult or Non-Existant. Unless a place is right by your office, you’re probably not going to want to walk.
Prime Card: does the restuarant offer a discount? If so, how much?
Don’t Miss: A menu item or aspect of the lunch that stands out.
We’ll also try to include links to the restaraunt’s site and directions from Live Maps. If you have any other suggestions, would like to learn more, or have experiences of a place to share, let us know in the comments!
– The MicroGrubbers
