Open for about two and a half weeks, Snap! (which is owned by the same fella who owns the Pop! restaurant just a couple doors down on Johnson Street—no word on whether a Crackle! is in the works) offers up pizza, hot hoagies, salads and ice cream. The restaurant’s décor is sparse and the furniture, from the look of the booths and the chairs we sat in, uncomfortable. The ceiling is painted a dark brown with a drip effect coming down the beige walls. Whether this initially was an accident that turned into an “artsy” interior design decision, I don’t know. And I don’t care. The vibe is, Harold and I decided, weird. Unsure of whether to cater to families and kids or be a funky lunch spot, Snap failed to cultivate in me a strong desire to return.
Well, I take that back. There were some very attractive women seated in there whose orders were messed up, along with just about everybody else’s. One woman in particular walked in shortly after Harold and I sat at our table in the front of the restaurant that I could scarcely peel my eyes from. About 5 foot 5, with shoulder length sandy blond hair, brown corduroy pants and a form fitting T-shirt she revealed upon taking off her light coat on this unseasonably warm November day in Minneapolis. Pale blue eyes, not a particle of makeup on her face, radiating Colorado Rocky Mountain health…
Oh, the food. Generally, I avoid ordering pizza by the slice. Something about those heated glass cases with slabs of pizza waiting for a mouth to feed. And waiting. And waiting. You can, of course order whole pizzas, but for a quick lunch, it seemed impractical, particularly given the bungled orders that we overheard immediately upon walking in the door. Did I mention the stunningly attractive woman that walked in after us? The sandy blond hair? The T-shirt that read “BEER” across a very well-proportioned chest? And her oh-so natural, warm-featured face?
A-hem. We ordered slices of pepperoni, sausage and cheese pizza off the rack, and bowls of Greek minestrone soup. The pizza wasn’t horrible, just uninspired. Although the sausage had some good flavor. If I were to return to stalk that woman, that’s what I’d order.
But, alas, unless they iron out their service kinks and develop a better tasting tomato sauce, my only hope for running into that beauty again will be random chance at one of the other thousand restaurants in the Twin Cities, because Snap! will have shut its doors. The manager there was having a heck of a time keeping his new and inexperienced counter help on the same page. It wasn’t for lack of effort on their part, I think, just chaos between the two registers and orders crossed between people eating in and people waiting (and waiting) for their take-out order. Two other beauties walked to the counter with their hoagies saying that they had the wrong sandwiches. A man walked in towards the end of our meal and was told that his order mistakenly went out with someone else.
Harold and I sat at our table, in chairs that resembled what you’d find in a kindergarten classroom, hoping that at least the soup would send us back to our cubicles in a mood that would carry us lightly through the rest of the afternoon—it was Friday for chrissakes, and the week had been hellacious. But no. It also wasn’t terrible, but if it was made fresh it was still bland enough to taste like it came from a bag.
All we had was the scenery. Which was nice. Did I mention the woman with pale blue eyes…