Willie's Ice House Onion Rings
A Family Outing
or...
not?
Willie's Ice House strikes me as a really strange, chaotic, nonsensical, uncomfortable place. After you walk in, you stand in a line surrounded by tubs of ice with beer bottles in them. The idea might be that you could choose a beer, open it, and begin consuming it while in line. I must mention that you can't see any sort of menu from this place in the line, but then suddenly you turn the corner to see a giant menu on the wall. You are then required to somehow quickly decide and place your order, except you aren't really placing your order, you are just deciding what you want and a person writes it down for you. Then, this writing person hands you the paper with your order on it and you're supposed to get your own drinks and wander around and find a seat. After you find a seat, EVENTUALLY, a server notices you and comes to pick up the piece of paper. He or she then verifies your order and takes it off to the kitchen. Um. . . okay. This would all work flawlessly if you were someone who drinks alcohol and you were getting buzzed while going through the line so you didn't care how long it took you to get food. But we don't drink. No, we don't.
Significantly, they have a giant sandbox for kids to play in during this process. Of course, my kids wanted to play in this sandbox. Of course, I was rather hesitant to let my kids play in the sandbox because we were, well, just about to eat. But I relented and had to take them to wash hands right after the food got there. So now my kids also have no shoes on. Great. Fun.
But on to the onion rings! The picture below is the large. It is like a small cookie sheet-sized tray. It was probably between a pound and a half or two of onion rings. With a small side of ranch. The type of real buttermilk perfectly runny ranch. Yeah. . . I could already see that was going to need topping off. But will we ever see our server again? Doubtful.
The onion rings themselves are large. Not quite as big as my 7 year-old's face. But he is a really, really smart kid and has a large head.
As everyone in the family ate them, the first comment was "Wow, these are really HARD!"
This was good, though, because if any that play sand mixed in with them, we wouldn't have noticed. The batter
was almost rock hard. One could use extra, extra crunchy as an adjective also, but it was a little beyond that. The onions inside were thick and meaty. They were by no means spicy, salty, or flavorful but there was a slight hint of some sort of red pepper seasoning in there somewhere. It was a hearty meal-like main-dish-type onion ring, if there could be such a thing.
The restaurant has other food, too. Very greasy fried burgers, giant baked potatoes, huge piles of crawfish, and tons of fries with lots of old bay type seasoning generously used on them. Most of the customers were just there to eat the crawfish, I think. Even the parking lot had some crawfish shells in it... with ants tasting them. The kids were pretty amused. The onion rings were documented. We probably won't go there again.
