Critic's Review
Charcuterie Too! has closed; they're doing some remodeling at the library (again) and frankly, the place was never as good as the know-nothing bloggers in this town portrayed it; a couple of visits failed to impress me. It's a loss if you work in the area, because most of the other choices for lunch aren't very good ones; but this was never a place you would go out of your way to visit.
*******
Occasionally you'll hear someone rave about something they had at Charcuterie Too!, and you start thinking, wow, there's a good restaurant in the Library? Well its more likely that the rave was more about the surprise of getting something halfway decent to eat at a library cafeteria.
The place has sort of an urban look, which is better than the schoolroom look
On their web site they have a "review" from 2005 where its claimed that this place has a cafeteria look, but 'restaurant quality food'. I suppose that could be true if you consider Chipotle a restaurant. This place is a cafeteria all the way. Their entrees are all laid out on a steam table; they microwave the food to warm it up before giving it to you. I guess restaurants might do that sometimes. But after seeing the food in the steam table I've often changed my mind about thinking that a menu item was of interest.
They have a marker board with the specials as you walk in, and the first thing that I noticed is that they have quite a few more items than they showed on their web site. The only thing that caught my eye on my first visit was a stuffed chicken breast, but once I saw it in the steam table it looked too much like cafeteria food and I lost interest. They had 3 versions of chunky chicken salad, a personal favorite; one was regular, one was supposedly chicken pomeroy, and one was some sort of apple mixture. Now Pomeroy chicken is usually made with tarragon and mustard, but the girl said something about grapes and nuts, so I didn't want to take a chance. I asked her to make me a sandwich with the regular chicken salad on rye bread and with cole slaw. She didn't seem to remember any of this, as she made the sandwich on wheat bread and tried to give me potato salad. I caught the potato salad but didn't notice the bread right away and decided to let it go.
You pay at the end of the counter and you have to ask for silverware as they don't have any out. The whole thing is kind of annoying as nobody seems to understand English too well and if you don't know how things work its just a struggle to get normal service. They also only have pink and white, so iced tea is out. Finally I found my way to a table and dug in.
The chicken salad was simple enough and the meat was tender. It needed a bit of salt, and the tomato wasn't entirely ripe. The cole slaw was edible; not too sweet but a bit heavy on the vinegar. The price tag for the sandwich with a bottle of water: $8.96.
I wanted to try an entree so when I spotted stuffed cabbage on the menu I decided to give it a try. I usually enjoy stuffed cabbage; I even like the Stouffer's version. It looked pretty good in the steam table and they sure do give you a generous portion. Apparently the steam table isn't too warm because they microwaved it for about a minute before giving me the plate.
I'd give it a B-. While it was prepared well, there was very little taste. There wasn't much of a sauce; usually this is served with a light tomato sauce. I only ate half of it and when I reheated the leftovers with a bit of my favorite marinara sauce it was downright excellent: too bad I couldn't get it like that in the restaurant.