Ninety-nine reasons to go to Agave Grill

When Deb and Jeff came up to visit a few weeks ago, I promised them a tour of northwest Connecticut, complete with old factory sightings and scenic routes through countryside. After stopping in Cheshire for hot chocolates from Greenwich Coffee – an independent coffee-shop offering “Mexican hot chocolate” and “Ancho Chile hot chocolate” as well as bubble teas – we headed north to Torrington, where we were to eat lunch.

It was a chilly day. This is important, because it helps to explain the grievous lapse in judgment to which I will soon admit.

We walked up the streets of downtown Torrington, looking for a place to sit and eat. There were a few places with local color, including a Nicholas Pizza (which appeared to have a little too much local color – as in, ties to the mob or some such) and a little café named after a Helen or a Hannah, but for some reason, we didn’t stop there. We headed back, instead, toward the strip-mall parking lot I had parked in, and decided to go to our back-up choice, the Ninety-Nine restaurant.

I had never been to a Ninety-Nine, though I knew it was a chain. But how bad could it be? I thought. All chains are basically the same. We won’t get anything great or unique or truly interesting, but we won’t get anything terrible, either.

But Ninety-Nine, by the end of lunch, impressed me with its ability to get almost every aspect of the bland, corporate chain-restaurant concept, wrong.

First, the menu made no sense, unless it had been designed around the idea of being moderately appealing to all of middle-class America. I ordered fish tacos, for instance (not very good, and the cilantro was horribly wilted and almost nonexistent); Deb ordered beef tips (clearly not the tips of anything, but steak, cut up); I forget what Jeff ordered – pork chops? – but I recall someone commenting on the chicken pot pie. What have these meals to do with each other? What sense of identity (even a corporate one) can be surmised from this?

The waitress, who was cheerful and bubbly, also brought us what seems to be Ninety-Nine’s signature, free appetizer: a basket of butter-flavored popcorn.

The food wasn’t very good. My fish tacos had clearly been made to suit my assumed “American” tastes, and Deb’s beef tips were large enough to necessitate cutting – but this was not nearly as ridiculous as her broccoli, which was plated intact, as in, one very large stalk of broccoli, the cutting of which ended in a gravy disaster for Deb’s sweater (which cleaned up miraculously well).

The décor was no help. Ninety-Nine had clearly, like all chain restaurants, imported sets of items to be displayed on the walls; still, there was no sense that the design teams inevitably called in for this purpose had any better idea of what should go where, or why, than a three-year-old scribbling in crayon on the hallway wallpaper.

None of the pictures or plaques or artifacts were hung crookedly. That was the up-side.

Here’s what they should have decorated with: bottles of beer. The reference to the song would have served several purposes, in addition to being the most clever decorating scheme a restaurant called “Ninety-Nine” could hope for. It would have warned us all about what to expect – a crass, slightly hick-town feel in a chain restaurant – and it would have added a sense of coherence to the theme. They could have made themselves into a brewery.

As it was, decorations seemed to have no common theme. Unlike at Pizza Hut, where large photos of Italy adorn the walls, or Chili’s, where there’s at least an effort at displaying southwestern memorabilia, looking at the objects on Ninety-nine’s walls was like looking through a trunk in your grandmother’s attic – in a bad way. There was one sign that made a saucy reference to Lizzie Borden’s school of etiquette, and many of the objects were made to look antique-American; but in the corner of the room, suspended from the ceiling, was a TV showing baseball spring training. What do sports have to do with Lizzie-Borden-type Americana? (This is a rhetorical question.)

The plaque reciting the creation story of the restaurant revealed that the incoherence likely dated back to the first, probably charming restaurant, which had (for no reason, or for personal ones) a horseshoe nailed around the name; thus, the horseshoe had become the corporate logo when the business became franchised.

I once visited Bird In Hand, PA, with my grandmother, and stopped at a barn sale. A man – possibly an Amish man – had died, and all of his things were being sold out of the barn in which he kept them. Fascinatingly, the man had kept what looked like every single newspaper he had ever read; the rest of his things offered similar insights into his character: LPs, old blankets, glass bottles from decades ago. I bought an old, empty bottle of Dr Pepper and one of 7-up, likely from the 70s (or whenever 7-up’s motto was “You like it. It likes you.”), which I still have. I was very happy with the barn sale, the items inside, and my purchase. I like these sorts of haphazard, idiosyncratic experiences.

But imagine that a corporation had noticed the popularity of the barn sale and decided to franchise it. Across the country, you would find “Amish Barn Sale” buildings going up, concrete but with stressed wooden facades to make them look authentic; inside, you would find novelty newspapers, probably sorted so that you could find your birthdate, and definitely overpriced. What had been a window into one man’s personal (packrat) habits would become a vehicle for corporate interests: that Dr Pepper bottle would be a Dr Pepper ad, as all “nostalgia”-based, ye-olde-style, mass-produced items are. Soon, “Amish Barn Sale” stores would be in the malls next to Abercrombies or Old Navys or Gaps. It would be disgusting.

We left Ninety-Nine and drove around the hills of Litchfield and Torrington and New Hartford, saw some old factories and a sugar shack, and went home.

The next day, having failed to drive to Boston in the several inches of overnight snow, we debated where to eat. I had recently noticed a new restaurant on the road-that-is-a-strip-mall, Queen’s St., in Southington; I had noticed it because it was an Agave Grill, the restaurant I had taken a friend to, in Hartford, right before she moved to Kyrgyzstan this fall. I had assumed that Agave was a single restaurant, and though seeing another instance of it made me suspicious of franchising, my friend and I had had a good time there, so I suggested that Deb, Jeff and I try it out.

When we arrived, the greeter informed us that there were “plenty of seats on the patio” – a joke, since the patio was covered in snow – and we laughed. When we sat down, our waitress, Michelle, came over and immediately enchanted us with her unselfconscious banter and apparent intelligence. She was so impressive, in fact, that Debbie suggested we hire her as a “consultant waitress”: “Oh, no,” Deb said, as though speaking to waitstaff at another restaurant. “We’ve brought our own waitress.”

The food was pretty good, well-plated and nicely presented. The atmosphere was coherent and low-key, allowing people to focus on each other rather than a crazy décor. They did not offer us popcorn.

As we left Agave Grill, satisfied with our experience as a whole and charmed by the staff, a man coming into the restaurant noticed Deb and I and said, as he swung wide the door, “Ladies” – as in, “I’ll hold the door for you.” As Jeff appeared behind us and came through the door, the man said “But not you,” pretended to let the door go, and laughed. We all laughed.

But we never did ask Michelle if she would free-lance for us.

Maybe next time.

Deborah Harbin contributed to the writing of this post.