Lunch with Louie at The Good Earth
Santa Barbara food reviews with Louie the pessimist food critic

Feb 17, 5:12 PM (PT)
By Louie

Picture this - sadness, anguish and despair have taken possession of your being. Your wife of 31 years informs you that she is leaving you. She has fallen in love.  She is moving to Mallaga with your cousin Elizabeth and never coming back.  What’s even worse is that your mother agrees, and she has given her blessings. Wandering aimlessly for 3 days you forget to feed your cat who mistakes your middle toe for a piece of string cheese and with unseen ferociousness attacks it viciously converting your foot into a mangled mass of flesh.

Now, as you are staring at the empty walls of your empty house you wonder how could it all have happened, and why are you hungry? But you are.  How can you go to a place where people are eating and maybe enjoying themselves when you are in the middle of the biggest depressive state you have ever been? Well buddy, do I have the restaurant for you! Have no fear.  In this place nobody enjoys themselves.

The Good Earth at 5955 Calle Real in Goleta is just the most impersonal and boring place you can find.  And it holds a very particular honor among restaurants in this town.  It’s the only place where no matter what you order it all taste the same.  Ed and I had in front of us a soup, a cashew chicken salad, a turkey club sandwich and two rolls.  It didn’t matter where your fork poked. It all tasted the same.

The only thing that clashed with the place was our waitress. Miss ‘Happy and Perky’ was running around between 8 tables trying to please everybody, all at a lightning speed and wearing a glued-on smile.  As she glided along she would recite “More coffee? More water? More bread? Is everything Ok? How is the food? Can I get you something else?” She was functioning at a minimum of 220 volts of happiness and perk.

Even when the fellow sitting next to us returned his chicken because, and I quote “this tastes a little strange”, not even that made her lose her perkiness.  “I will be so Happy and Perky to bring you something else.  Why, I will tell the cook to get something else out of the FREEZER!” Quote.

The soup was insipid and watery and tasted like the broccoli in the salad which in turn tasted like the turkey which itself tasted like the avocado and so on, and so on. The club sandwich had some bacon bits that besides tasting like cauliflower will be very useful during fiesta: you can use them like confetti.

The Good Earth is a good place to go when you just don’t care – when you’ve got to eat something, but don’t care what it is.  You know exactly what you’re going to get, and that eliminates the trouble of choosing from the menu.

Are you depressed? Well now you know where to eat. The Good Earth doesn’t discriminate; you will get the same food that everyone gets. And I mean the same. So lets summarize this review.  The Good Earth -anemic, banal, blah, commonplace, flat, lifeless, mundane, ordinary, plain, tame, tedious, unimaginative, and yawn – all served with a pinch of perky.

- Louie

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