Review: Henry’s Food And Spirits (♦)

“The law provides that, if food is ordered, it must be paid for whether eaten or not.”

These prominent words on the menu don’t exactly match The Outback’s “no rules” as a customer-friendly slogan, but they’re a most appropriate warning and disclaimer for anyone finding themselves at Henry’s Food And Spirits at the end of the Mendenhall Mall. The only possible legal counterargument is this isn’t food, merely a caricature presented as satirical art for those with a sardonic sense of humor.

We shared many laughs there and it wasn’t because we were in the lounge. Nearly the entire menu features plates with lumps of various primal and drab colors large and distinctive enough to come from Fisher-Price. Someone in the know going there for a single familiar item - say, a burger or pancakes - can escape unscarred, but bringing an unenlightened family is best thought of as “quality time” before getting takeout pizza on the way home.

Food writers love places like this because it allows them to show the pummeling power of words, limited only by their own creativity. But there’s little joy using Henry’s for literary target practice because the bullseye is too easy to hit and some innocent employees deserving rescue from these ranges are victims of friendly fire.

Furthermore, words seem inadequate to describe the hopeless struggle of our plates to maintain their dignity under their burdens. A cobb salad making a mockery of its namesake by coming topped with actual “cobbs” (those wretched little baby corns). Sweet-and-sour Chinese where the sauce was - we swear - canned cherry pie filling that could be lifted like a rubber pancake with a fork after it cooled. A steak cooked into rawhide, followed by a replacement that was raw.

This used to be Tabby’s, where for years older family members came every Sunday for reasons we couldn’t understand. The genuinely earthy service must have been one, along with the familiar comfort of the same simple plate of eggs or some other dish. Not much has changed over time, although though the dining room has a lighter and cleaner feel. The setting is flexible, with a cocktail lounge and a children’s play area. Truth is, the more time one spends here, the easier it is to understand why there might be a fierce loyalty among customers and employees. There’s a real energy to please here and many of the diners — from elderly couples to disabled children celebrating an occasion to the lone silent guy reading the paper on a stool at the counter — add a sense of rugged communal wholesomeness. One could probably pass hours hearing fascinating life stories with any of them.

It’s a plus Henry’s serves breakfast all day, maybe the best reason to come if you’re in the mood for heavy fare and can’t make the half-mile trip to Donna’s at the Airport Shopping Center. A three-egg vegetarian omelet ($9) had far more mushrooms than tomatoes and peppers wrapped inside a thin egg disc, but was decent in a greasy diner (as opposed to fern-room fluffy) kind of way. Someone in the mood for the reindeer sausage omelet ($10) certainly couldn’t complain about the amount of meat inside. The home fries were diced potatoes that were neither appealingly crispy nor unappetizingly undercooked. They were a better option than the thin rectangular slab of hash browns that looked like they’d been cooked (for too long) only on one side.

Pancakes ($2 for one, $4 for two, $5 for three) are the size of a small plate and cooked nicely despite being very thick. An IHOP fan looking for a substitute in Juneau said these are the best sampled so far, even if they aren’t served with real maple syrup. Interestingly, despite all the gravy and sausage on the menu, there’s nothing related to pouring them over the biscuits.

The country-fried steak ($10 breakfast, $14 dinner) is a battered hamburger thrown in the deep fryer, not the well-pounded round steak that makes for one of diner food’s greatest pleasures. Too many places have succumbed to the cheap and easy fake version served in school cafeterias and senior centers, the same kind of culinary travesty experienced by people who think of Alaska salmon as that pink stuff that comes in cans. Speaking of cans, our man behind the plate was pretty certain the white gravy covering the steak came from one. He also tried the “real mashed potatoes,” although they would have been better if they were instant. (”whipped into a thin pasty consistency then, to salvage, undercooked potatoes were mixed in to give it those ‘down-home cooking’ lumps,” he mused). He had little luck passing them off on the rest of us. They were drowned in a brown gravy, creating a near-perfect ying and yang color combination with the steak, but the flavors were remarkably similar and unappealing. “In Texas they shoot people for less,” one of our Midwest transplants mused, looking at the plate.

In China they’d also send a bill for the bullet to the family of the person responsible for the sweet and sour pork and/or halibut, both cooked to an indistinguishable dryness and topped with that pinkish pie filling. The almond chicken was equally dreadful, topped with the same brown gravy suffocating the mashed potatoes. On the other hand, ordered as part of the Chinese combo ($15.50), it made for a pastel version of the ying and yang experience.

The New York steak (eight ounces for $16, 12 for $20) was an exercise in comedic extremes, with a store-grade slab ordered medium rare arriving well done. The kitchen clearly was unprepared when we sent it back, as the replacement arrived with a hot exterior and stone-cold interior, almost certainly because it’d been thrown on the grill directly from the freezer.

Given the strangeness of everything else, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising the best meat plate was the liver and onions ($13), a huge slab able to survive a thorough cooking without getting tough. Scrape off the gravy and ask for a few more onions and this nightmare of childhood isn’t a bad option — keep in mind people pay $50 for an morsel of goose liver, so maybe adults who haven’t ingested one from a cow recently might find it worth a try.

Those cobbs in the cobb salad ($10) was good for more merriment at Henry’s sense of the absurd, as they took the place of traditional baseline ingredients such as chicken and avocado. At least there were bacon bits, hard boiled eggs and blue cheese, giving it a faint semblance of what it was supposed to be.

The Britain burger ($8.75), a frozen patty topped with bacon and American and Swiss cheeses, was the only entree on one particular evening to emerge as decent. The burgers remained competent and unexciting on a couple of return trips (if cooked rather dry). It’s possible to get a few unusual variations such as an Alaska burger ($8.75) topped with cheese and large cocktail-size shrimp, but the sea creatures don’t have enough flavor to compete with everything else. It’s best to go with traditional toppings like bacon and mushrooms — or go for a strong flavor like Mexi-burger ($8.75), whose fixings include chili and Spanish meat sauce.

They also do a number of sandwiches, mostly the hot kind ranging from grilled tuna to BLTs. The Monti Cristo ($9 and, yes, that’s how Henry’s spells it) is a passable version of the artery-clogging classic, with meat, egg and cheese wedged between three layers of french toast, but seemed oddly dry and lacking in flavor for that much fat. Even those McGriddles down the street have more to recommend them. The patty melt ($8.45) was another dry burger and cheese on bread that was lightly grilled, a better alternative than burnt.

The accompanying fries - coated either with batter or leftover food particles in old frying oil - had the distinction of being unappealingly crunchy long after they cooled on our first trip. It can be worth paying the extra $2 for onion rings: only four came with each of our orders, but that’s because they were fist-sized with equally thick onion slices and batter. A couple were overcooked, but even they were better than the fries.

Sides did little beyond filling empty spaces on dishes. Soups - clam chowder and beef noodle - were the heavy, artificially thick and overly salty gloops of immediate familiarity to anyone who’s opened a can of Campbell’s Chunky. A few of the side salads were OK, but the lettuce on others was browning. The best item was the plain steamed broccoli and cauliflower, fresh and still crisp, but one hardly needs to go out for that.

But the worst tragedy wasn’t suffered by our digestive tracts, but rather by our server who resonated with everyone at the table in spite of the food she had to deliver. She wasn’t overly sweet, artificial or sophisticated — just eager to please under impossible circumstances. It was painful, like watching Jimi Hendrix play an out-of-tune axe with two broken strings.

If not for her and the few dishes that aren’t outright disasters, Henry’s might not even get one star on our ratings. But it is possible to get in and out of there with an enjoyable experience not based on laughing at their screw-ups. Find a comfort zone and this can be a hangout for the same reason one of us frequents the Silverbow even though they almost never get an order right and others are regulars at Chan’s Thai Kitchen despite their abusive-and-proud-of-it service policies. It’s an odd chemistry thing — which at Henry’s also unfortunately ends up being the best way to describe the food.