Blue Collar restaurant fucks it up

Blue Collar is a "roadside hamburger" type restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn which I wrote about a while ago. Pretty good hamburgers, not as great as everyone says but good enough that I'll go out of my way to stop there.

The highlight of the visit was the soda machine, it was a 1960/70s looking machine all boxy and nostalgia inducing. And it gave delicious soda, the mix was perfect. I actually asked if they used a special sort of soft drink mix when I first went there it was so different and old-fashioned tasting.

But in this last visit the machine was changed, it was a new machine and all the drinks in it weren't just not-as-good but they were off flavor. Poorly mixed.

Not only a dining fail, but it makes the restaurant look cheap. So sad.

Mountain Dew Fruit Punch Kickstart

Kickstart, why you so hard to get?  They give samples away for free at my wife's work but she wasn't allowed a can to bring me.  I don't see it for sale anywhere in my neighborhood.  Nowhere is Mountain Dew Kickstart buyable for a Bronxian like myself.  So what has to happen? 

A pal visiting Minnesota takes a can and puts it in a cardboard box.  Someone took the time to make that box out of raw box stuff, and they had to make the tape and the Sharpie used to address it, too.  All this effort went into making a box and packing peanuts which this woman used to contain this can.  The box was driven to a post office and money was exchanged, a bargain struck that the post office man would see to it that I received the can of soda inside the box.  That man put paper stickers and stamps on it, then put it in a box which was put on a truck and moved in and out of other buildings and trucks until it had come about 1300 miles.  Then it was put in the smallest truck yet and from there probably stuck in a green street pick up box.  A guy on foot, new on the job, put that box in a wheeled bag and brought it to my building.  He let himself inside with a key and then rode an elevator to my floor.

He rang the bell and handed me the box.

Seriously Mountain Dew, just stock the crap at my supermarket.  It'll be so much easier for everyone.  And Throwback Mountain Dew and Caffeine Free Mountain Dew, stock those too.

My refrigerator is entirely stocked with things that are derived 

from southern culture.  That's two Mountain Dews, 

orange juice, and homemade pimento cheese. 

I wanted to open the stuff back immediately but held off.  It's a breakfast drink, I shall drink it for breakfast.  In all fairness I now see that the can doesn't actually say "drink this shit first thing in the morning, yo."  In fact, the can doesn't say much at all but just says what it is - an "Energizing Fruit Punch with just the right amount of KICK". 

In case you didn't believe me.  

And look at that weird white bar there on the upper right, that's some 

of that there bad composition you hear so much about.

But yesterday I was ignorant of these niceties, I just put the can in the refrigerator and sat down to wait.  Twelve hours later I hopped off my sleeping palette and ran to the refrigerator.  Brush my teeth?  Heck no, maybe the Mountain Dew'll do that for me. 

A quick pull and, holy shit, it's delicious.  What the hell.  Mountain Dew consistently fucks up their off flavors, White Out and the long lost lime flavor excepted, but this was great.  It was actually refreshing, a word I hear bandied about quite a bit but never really experience.  In high school I used to drink a can of Mountain Dew in the morning on an empty stomach, it was my breakfast.  For the next three hours I'd stagger around like I'd been punched in the stomach, miserable and sick but unwilling to admit I was wrong to "do the dew". 

This is different.  I can totally see drinking this in the morning.  I mean, fuck, it didn't make me sick to my stomach and that's AWESOME.

I'll keep going, there must be poison in here somewhere.

One of the crazy things about this drink is that it has half the calories of a smaller can of Mountain Dew without any diet taste.  There's a little bit of tongue numbness in there, but nothing awful.  I do wonder about the "5% Juice" boast.  If it's 5% juice but white grape juice concentrate is the third ingredient, what does that tell us about the volume of water and corn syrup in this can?  If I was algebra-wise I'd be all over that like a duck on a word problem, but I ain't so I'll let it go.

And it's good to see something with the word energy on the can that doesn't taste like a hedge witch's anus.

A fun drink but:

It caught up with me.  Half an hour after drinking half the can I had a huge headrush, a little woozy and a little tunnel-visiony.  I had to sit down and remember that the doctor told me that metric fucktons of the caffeines are bad for dudes my age.  But it passed and I live, so things aren't that bad.

 

Pantothenic Acid is a new one, I think.  And is there a recommended daily dose of phosphorus?  Really?  Sadly I can't drink any more of this because I'm a true American and eschew gum arabic 

in all its form.

Mayim Chaim Cola and Half and Half

I'm tempted to say that these drinks are the equivalent of Catholic mortification for the Hebrew set, a sort of liquid hair shirt for those what have it coming, but that would be an exaggeration. A slight exaggeration.

Rather than being good or bad these are just blah, the cola especially. The cola isn't very fizzy, it isn't very sweet and it isn't very cola-esque. It ain't much at all. It's a bit like they bought the cola soda kit and added half as much syrup as they should've.

The Half & Half tastes nothing like milk, I should joke, but I won't. It's much better than the cola, which isn't saying much. In all honesty I could drink the Half & Half if hard pressed, it wouldn't be the most onerous task set before me in an average day. Lemony and etc it fails to offend.

Why do these sodas exist? Is a mild soda some Jewish ideal? Do their dietary restrictions caution against to much carbonation lest you be plagued by The Lord? I dunno, they are an inscrutable people.