Ego Trip

Our night did have a high point, though: a fabulous hot cinnamon-crumble apple crisp. Unfortunately, we couldn't say the same for Lisa's chocolate cobbler. "It tastes like it's nothing but Oreo crumbs," she said. "I thought it would be like a cake."

Yeah, well, I thought Fritz Co. Grille would be like a steakhouse.

"The Bristol has nothing to worry about," said my friend Teena on another visit that also included David and Carol. That night, we shared an undistinguished calamari appetizer before Teena's sautéed tilapia arrived smothered in a thick, spicy red-pepper sauce. She finally scraped the sauce to the side. "The kitchen needs to understand that less is more."

David, however, gave thumbs up to a generous bowl of pasta tossed in a Cajun-spiced cream sauce with chicken, crawfish and andouille sausage. "I got the best dish of the night," he bragged.

But Carol was also thrilled with her unadorned slab of salmon grilled with garlic and dill. And I'd gone ahead and ordered the mysterious espresso-crusted strip. The recipe must be some guarded secret, because even one of the managers told me that he wasn't quite sure what was in the seasoning mixture. "But I think — I'm not sure — there's some kind of coffee in it." Whatever. I liked it. The steak had been delicately blackened, seasoned with great subtlety and perfectly grilled. But the slightly chewy strip wasn't the finest I'd ever tasted.

Once again, the best part of the meal was the finale: a superb, moist bread pudding served white-hot in a little black skillet, drenched in a bubbly, buttery caramel sauce. We almost battled over the last luscious bite.

If Tom Allen had been trying to bring out our own aggressive egos, it worked. For a lot less than we would have paid a professional.