More restaurants: Andy's Diner & Etta's

Well, Andy's was retro before retro was in. It was the kind of place where I felt I had to order a glass of the house red wine, if you know what I mean, and it seems most of the people there were regulars. Really good onion rings, and great housemade clam chowder. Service was really rushed, we got our soup/salad while we were eating the o-rings, and the entrees showed up when we were halfway through the soup/salad. The steaks are good, and reasonably priced. I had a 10-oz "prime steak" which is what I think is a very rare skirt steak with barbeque sauce. It's good; the hashbrowns that came with it were underdone. The prime rib was fine, nothing extraordinary but at $16.95 for a 12-oz slab, you can't really ask for more. With that we had pasta Alfredo, which while good is *really* garlic-y. Hubby was happy because they have Alaskan Amber on tap. Passed on dessert -- evidently they get their pies at the beginning of the week and by Friday all that was left was cherry and banana cream. I wanted the coconut cream...wanted to compare it to the Tom Douglas' restaurants version I had for lunch yesterday. Oh, well. Another day. Speaking of Tom Douglas restaurants, we had lunch at Etta's yesterday. The day boat scallops were incredible -- about as sweet as I've ever tasted. My halibut was nicely crusted, and I really liked the lemon couscous under it and the harissa viniagrette on top. The coconut cream pie was as good as I remember from several years ago. The chocolate pistachio cake was good enough, but I'm not wild about the almond extract flavor it had. And, unfortunately, there were several pieces of pistachio shell in the cake. Those are really hard, we're glad no teeth were sacrified. Long lunch, expensive lunch ($75) but really really tasty. Server shared that Douglas is in the planning stages of opening a pizza parlor...interesting!