PCW: The Ascoto's

You take the blue pill -- the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill -- you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

- Morpheus, The Matrix

We took the red pill. And everything we knew -- well, everything we thought we knew -- is no more. And so, we enter the next chapter in the Portuguese Chicken Wars.

THE BACKGROUND

It all started here, with my nice, little anecdote about how I had been caught in the middle of a vicious feud amongst the three Portuguese chicken restaurants in my neighborhood, all separated by a one minute walk. The bad blood, according to the post, came to a head when a fire gutted Ogalo, one of the original two restaurants (the other being Ole). Some people allege that Ogalo burned itself down to claim insurance money and rebuild a new and better store. Others say that Portogali, the newcomer to the Portuguese chicken market, was simply trying to eliminate one of its competitors. Of course -- of course! -- none of this is true.

My creative liberties from the first post were -- ahem -- "clarified" here. Again, to be perfectly clear, there is no evidence of any ill will amongst the three establishments noted above, and there's certainly no evidence of any tomfoolery regarding the circumstances of the fire at Ogalo. That would just be silly.

The last installment was chronicled here, as we introduced Angelo's, the fourth entrant to the Portuguese chicken market in our neighborhood. Granted it's a bit further down the road, but it's still very much within our sphere of influence.

THE STATUS QUO

So: Ole, Ogalo, Portogali and Angelo's. Along with the three other guys in my apartment, we'd all been to each of these establishments. And the pecking order -- whether it was because of proximity to our apartment, seniority of the establishment or, more possibly, for no real rational reason -- was always just that: Ole, Ogalo, Portogali and Angelo's. And we lived every day, every week, every month with this unfounded hierarchy in our minds. It went unquestioned.

But one day, sometime shortly after Angelo's entered into our conscious, it went questioned. Why do we go to Ole and don't give Portogali any chance? Yes, Angelo's is more expensive, but maybe the food is that much better? Since the fire, has Ogalo changed for the better or worse? And, the kicker: Shouldn't we find out? We were faced, in essence, with Neo's choice from The Matrix: the blue pill or the red pill? Blissful ignorance or stark, unforgiving reality? We took the red pill. And that rabbit-hole, my friends... that rabbit-hole goes DEEP.

THE PROPOSAL

A blind taste test, pitting food from each of the four establishments, was agreed upon. But first, we had to iron out some details:

Name of contest: This actually came quite easily and naturally. We live on Ascot Street and often refer to our apartment as The Ascot. So clearly, "Ascot" had to be a part of the name. But we also wanted something that sounded Portuguese. And without much thought, the name Ascoto's was proposed, which we all agreed worked quite well. Just to do our due diligence, I came up with a few other ideas -- Ascotogali's and Ascotogalo's -- but the original name still stood, as it was the shortest and sweetest.

Food item: What kind of burger should we judge? And should we get it with or without chilli, a preferred add-on by all members of The Ascot? And what about chips? Should those be judged as well? In the end, it was determined that we'd judge each establishment's regular chicken burger, with chilli. But no chips. Keep it nice and simple.

Criteria: It was agreed that we'd judge each establishment and its burger on a variety of factors, each on a scale from 1 to 10, with taste being the overriding component. These were broken down as follows, with weighting for each criterion noted in parentheses: taste (70%), appearance (10%), price (5%), ambiance (5%), service (5%) and speed (5%). So taste would clearly trump all, but if a tiebreaker was needed, the other elements could tip the balance.

Prize: For one full month, we would provide the winner with our exclusive Portuguese chicken allegiance and patronage. And, of course, we'd provide our unwavering endorsement to any and all people who asked. We'd become evangelicals, if you will. (There's also been talk of presenting a trophy or plaque to the winning establishment, although I doubt we'll ever get around to that.)

THE DAY
January 18, 2009

Everything would change.

The four members of The Ascot convened, and we drew names out of a hat to see who would go to each establishment. The draw ended with the following assignments:

• AG Klein (aka Andy, aka Akka, aka Klein) – Ole
• M Sathiyamoorthy (aka Maz, aka Mayuran, aka Sathy) – Portogali
• AP Davis (aka Alex, aka Yogi, aka Fats) – Ogalo
• PF Short (aka Pete, aka Shorty, aka Francois) – Angelo's

For us, even the simple task of doing the draw made for quite the thrilling event, especially because no one wanted to walk all the way to Angelo's. The look of disgust on Shorty's face when he drew that name cannot be described. And then he sulked. He actually sulked.

Upon completion of the draw, we synched our clocks and headed out. All walking in the same direction down the street, we first reached Ole, my establishment. I bid adieu to the other guys as they continued down the street and I headed inside. There, I was greeted fairly indifferently by the guy behind the counter. I placed my order, sat down, and looked around to get a sense of ambiance. Now, as I've said, Ole has generally been our establishment of choice. It's close, it's fast, it's easy. But looking around the place... WOW. It's a piece of shit!!! The walls were dirty, there was food on the ground, newspapers were strewn on tables and the back door was propped wide open, providing me with a view of the garbage stacked outside. A fine dining establishment this is not. After a few minutes, the guy behind the counter very apathetically called out my order and gave me the food without so much a "Have a nice day!" or "Thanks a lot!". Left feeling quite dissatisfied and perhaps even a bit unnerved by the whole in-store experience, I headed back to the apartment.

I reached the apartment a short eight minutes after we had all departed. Quite an impressive time. And shortly thereafter, Maz showed up. Then Yogi. And then Shorty. Which means that the "speed" criterion was in exact correlation with each establishment's distance from our apartment. Makes sense.

We took a minute to record our ratings on the four criteria that didn't take the food into account: ambiance, service, speed and price. The former two are, of course, fairly subjective, with the latter two being very objective. Here's how the scorecard looked after this round:


So before we got to the big two parts of this test, here's how things stacked up (out of a total possible score of 20):

• Portogali: 14.5 points. Middle of the pack on most items, but completely unbeknownst to us, took top prize as the cheapest burger.
• Ole – 13.5 points. To no one's surprise, this won for speed. Also did well on price, but took a beating on ambiance and service.
• Ogalo – 11.5 points. Middle of the pack on everything.
• Angelo's – 9 points. No surprises here. Took top prize for ambiance but shat the bed on price and speed. The rating for service may have also been a little lower than expected.

And then, to the really exciting part: the taste test. Each burger was placed on an identical plate in the kitchen, with the name of its corresponding establishment taped to the bottom. As the other three guys waited in the living room, I shuffled the plates around so that we didn't know what was what. Shorty then went into the kitchen and sliced each burger into quarters. And finally, Yogi went into the kitchen and randomly picked one of the four burgers to bring out first.*

*There's no perfect place to make this admission, so I'll just do it here: I fully comprehend and acknowledge how ridiculously lame and absurd this entire exercise may appear to most people. I get it. You don't need to make me any more aware than I already am. But you know what? I don't care. It was awesome. I can't remember the last time I had such a fun and fulfilling afternoon.

Okay... back to the taste test!

We viewed Burger #1 to rate on appearance. Then we ate in silence. For there was to be no table talk here, no opportunity to bias the other judges.



We noted our ratings on our scorecards, Yogi cleansed his palate by gargling and spitting out water, and we then moved on to Burger #2, where we repeated the above process. And then again with the third and final burgers.

After completing the last burger, we tallied up the scores (still not knowing where each burger was from), averaged them out, and had a bit of a constructive dialogue. We all had our favorites, we all had our least favorites. And for the most part, we were in agreement. Following are the average point totals on taste and appearance for each burger (out of a total possible score of 80) and some of the group's collective thoughts:

• Burger #1: 60.5 points. This scored highly for three of us (with two giving it their highest rating), as it had a great spice and taste. Yogi was the only dissenter here. Appearance-wise, it was mediocre.
• Burger #2: 50.75 points. Generally average scores from all; certainly no one was gushing about it. However, it did very well on appearance. (It should also be noted that based on appearance, we all clearly knew that this burger was from Angelo's. While the other three burgers looked almost identical -- and we honestly didn't know where each was from -- this one clearly stood out like a sore thumb.)
• Burger #3: 56.5 points. No real consistency here from the group, as it received taste scores of 5, 7, 8 and 9. I was the vote for 9; this was my favorite burger, as it had a nice spicy, creamy sauce. This burger also received the worst scores on appearance.
• Burger #4: 52 points. No one was overwhelmed by this burger. While everyone agreed that the quality of the chicken may have been the best of any of the burgers, it lacked in taste and spice. Appearance scores were also relatively average.

So! Burger #1 finished first on taste and appearance, followed by burgers 3, 4 and 2. But which restaurant was each burger from? It was time for the unveiling.

We decided to go from last place to first. So Yogi first picked up the plate for Burger #2 to reveal Angelo's. As mentioned above, this came as no surprise to us. (What I thought was a bit of a surprise, however, was how dissatisfied we all were with the burger. Surely such an expensive burger would perform better! I guess not.)

We then moved on to unveil the third place burger, Burger #4. No one was ready for what was about to happen, for it... would... change... everything. EVERYTHING. Yogi picked up the plate:

Ole! Ole! OLLLLLEEEEEEE!!!!!! Holy crap!!! We honestly couldn't believe it. Our Portuguese chicken restaurant of choice for all these months/years had finished third in voting!!! THIRD!!! In case you couldn't tell from the above video, we were shocked, bewildered, astonished, dismayed, flabbergasted. Our lives would never be the same.

From what I can remember from the next few minutes, things were fairly ballistic. Shorty went into a corner and curled up into the fetal position. I blacked out and have been told that I killed a man with a trident. Yogi started hyperventilating into a paper bag. I think Maz may have even vomited.

But then we snapped out of it. We had come too far. We had to keep our composure. So we regrouped, had a group prayer and moved on. And now that we were down to two burgers -- from Ogalo and Portogali -- we decided to reveal the first place burger next, Burger #1. We honestly had no idea what to expect. Here's how it unfolded:

Unbelievable. Portogali won on taste/appearance! PORTOGALI!! Who would have thought it! The black sheep for all this time, and it easily won! We were all stunned.

And when we added up all the scores for each of the six criteria (click here for full tally of the voting), Portogali still stood on top, followed by Ogalo, Ole and Angelo's.

PORTOGALI! Winner of the first ever Ascoto's. Amazing.

THE FALLOUT

One person who didn't find this amazing at all, however, was Yogi. For he gave the Portogali burger a 5 on taste and would now have to get all his Portuguese chicken burgers from there, and only there, for the next month. Watch his reaction in the above video. He was shattered.*

*Ironically enough, Yogi was actually the first person to go to Portogali after the Ascoto's. And he's been back several times since. Guess he got over that one pretty quickly!

Yogi wasn't the only person who was shocked and dismayed by this outcome. Other members of the community couldn't believe what we had done. Nugget, a previous member of The Ascot and currently living in Canada, expressed his severe disapproval via Facebook. Joe, upon seeing the scorebook, threw it away in disgust. And so on and so forth.

We took the red pill and opened our eyes to a whole new world order. Was it what we expected? No. Was it without shock or disappointment? No. But it's the truth. It's the stark, unforgiving reality. It's the latest chapter in the Portuguese Chicken Wars.