Little America Coffee Shop

Address: 500 S. Main St., Salt Lake City, UT 84101. 801.596.5700.

Review: Restaurants in hotels are usually hit and miss. Often, it seems the hotel proprietor thinks, "Hey, we have a captive audience here, so let's serve them marginally-okay-although-thoroughly-overpriced food." Alright, I'm not sure how often that actually happens, but that sure seems to be what the proprietor of Little America was thinking when he opened his restaurant.

I had the buffalo burger. (Note: The American buffalo is actually bison, but we've been using the wrong name for centuries now.) Having lived in Nebraska, where Ted Turner has annoyed everyone by buying every plot of land and turning it into a buffalo range, I've eaten buffalo before. It's a good and tasty meat. This burger, however, was not. The meat was bland and lifeless (no pun intended). The menu indicated it came with grilled onions and blue cheese. Hogwash. The onions were barely cooked, and the blue cheese was so minimal I could barely taste it. Additionally, the bun was soggy and started breaking apart within forty-five seconds of the burger arriving at the table. The whole thing was a total loss, and at $10+ it was an overpriced total loss to boot.

I wasn't the only one in the group who felt this way about his lunch. We all disapproved of the quality of the food. In fact, we unanimously decided that next month's networking lunch would take place at a restaurant not in a hotel, and preferably one with far better food.

Rating: 4/10 (5/10 is average)