Soup Showdown

After a week-long break from school and blogging, I'm back!

To begin the week I took comfort by staying on campus and eating lunch at The Riverview Dining Room. The Dining Room is an all-you-can-eat buffet for $5.99 and is open for lunch Monday-Friday 11 am - 2:30 pm. 


As usual, The Dining Room was serving two types of soup. On Monday it was Old Fashioned Chicken Noodle Soup (pictured top) versus Vegetarian Lentil and Spinach Soup (pictured bottom). 

The Chicken Noodle Soup seemed to be a lot more popular than the Lentil and Spinach. When I served myself at 12:30 pm almost all of the Chicken Noodle Soup was gone, while the later hardly had any skimmed off the top. 


However, I preferred the Lentil Soup. It was different than what The Dining Room normally serves. Most of the time they serve Chicken or Turkey soup and I liked to see something new. 


The Chicken Noodle Soup had a strange taste to it. It had the same taste as The Dining Room's Roast Turkey soup. The entire soup has an overbearing roast meat flavor, which actually might be good, if it tasted authentic. Basically, it tastes like someone put in too much artificial flavor. For this reason, the Vegetarian Lentil and Spinach Soup wins. 

Riverview Dining Room: A UM-Flint staple

On Thursday I ate at The Riverview Dining Room, again. It's a great place for students to eat because it's right on campus on the third floor UCEN. The Dining Room is all-you-can-eat for $5.99.

To start I had the Tortilla Soup (pictured right). The soup wasn't spicy, like I would expect it to be, but I didn't mind.

Riverview Dining Room: Meh

I ate on campus of UM-Flint this week on Tuesday. The Riverview Dining Room is an all-you-can-eat buffet right on the campus of UM-Flint. It's located on the third floor of the University Center and costs $5.99. At lunch time they're open from 11 am to 2:30 pm. 


The Riverview Dining Room seems to be hit-or-miss. Some days I want to taste everything they have to offer. Other days I stick with the basics. On Tuesday of this week I went with the latter. 

On this day there wasn't anything offered that was particularly special. It was a choice between Beef and Broccoli stir fry, or Roast Turkey Breast (pictured right). The turkey didn't have a lot of flavor. It was kind of pink too, which really grosses me out. I think it would have been better if they had offered some kind of gravy to top it off. 

Riverview Dining Room: A Look at the All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

To end my school week I ate at the Riverview Dining Room on Thursday. The Riverview Dining Room is located on the third floor of the University Center at UM-Flint. For $5.99, the Dining Room serves an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet between 11 am and 2:30 pm. It's open to all students and staff, and it's even open to the general public. 

While there were many options at the buffet, I chose the cheese ravioli in marinara sauce with a side of broccoli (pictured right). It was decently good, too. The broccoli was crisp and tasted pretty fresh. It wasn't soggy, like it had been sitting out for a while. The ravioli was stuffed full of cheese and I was given plenty of sauce too. I would have liked a bigger portion, but it wasn't a big deal because I could have gotten more if I wanted. The other meal to choose from was spaghetti and fried clams. I'm not a fan of fried clams so I didn't really want to try it. 

Introduction

Hello Bloggers!


I'm setting up my first blog here on blogger.com, and am only hoping for the best. For this blog I will review one restaurant a week (yes one, I live on a college student's budget) and will post my review every Tuesday night. I am hoping that I will gain a better understanding of blogging and the tools that are provided to do so.


I am also looking forward to becoming familiar with the many dining options in downtown Flint. Currently I've only been eating on the campus of UM-Flint at the University Pavilion and the Riverview Dining Room.


I plan to report and review my dining experience at each restaurant. Included in each post will be the cost of the meal, what my guests and I have ordered, and how we rated each meal and our overall experience. I will always include photos of meals, and the restaurant, to enhance my blog post. I will also provide a link to the restaurant's Web site, if available. On occasion I may find it appropriate to add video or sound footage. Those are factors dependent upon the setting and the atmosphere of the restaurant. In other words, it may be acceptable to shoot video footage at one restaurant, but not another.


I look forward to reading comments and to finally become a "blogger!"