Why I Hate The New Marathon Menu

I love Marathon Grill. I've been going there religiously since I was an undergrad, and have shared many a lunch at pretty much all of the locations. I love the simplicity of the diner food and appreciate the gourmet spin. Now I love a tuna melt as much as anybody else (probably moreso), but I feel much better about doing it with a garden salad on the side rather than french fries. Marathon lets me do that. Sure, it's a little more expensive than Midtown, for instance, but, as I'll post in a couple of days, you don't have to deal with possibly the poorest excuse I've ever seen for french onion soup. Today I went twice, just to show my loyalty.

Breakfast was fine. The "Blue Dot" coffee was, as always, refreshingly strong and effortlessly bottomless. The home fries were fantastic, and the egg wrap (with Pico, cheddar, and sour cream) was solid, but a little light on the pico.

Lunch was a whole different story. First, let's start with the menu. The new menu is smaller, with some new items, such as the flounder filet sandwich, the curried turkey salad on walnut bread (served with a beet and feta salad?!), and a shortribs sandwich. They've also changed several of the items, adding, for example, lemon aioli to my personal favorite, the chicken salad sandwich, and adding thousand island dressing to one of the burgers, in an attempt to gourmet-ify a Big Mac. They also removed (as far as we could tell), the hot dogs and the cheesesteaks.

The weirdest part of the menu though is a section called "Jay's Faves." In no particular order, "Jay" lists about 8 items off the menu that he "likes," yet all of these are new menus on the item. Thus, while a clever way to highlight the new items, this will get old fairly quickly. Plus, the B-School student in me realizes that they may make future menu decisions without taking into account the overpromotion of these items.

Then, the paper insert suggests some "items from the new menu" which is just a rearranged version of "Jay's Faves." Lastly, Mr. Rogers does not appear on this menu, a highlight of the old menu.

So after being told three times about the new short rib sandwich, I figured I'd try it, against my better judgement. What came out was a mess. First off, the sandwich is spilling out of the bun from the kitchen. I don't know how meat wound up UNDER the bottom of the bun, but it was there. There's really no excuse for this -- my sandwich rule 1: as hefty as a sandwich is, all meat should be reasonably contained by bread at time of serving.

My first bite (with only about a third of the meat in the roll) presented me with a slightly leathery beef drenched in gravy. Now I make short ribs. And the whole POINT of short ribs is that you cook them until the meat is incredibly tender. You don't quickly cook this meat, as the muscle fibers don't get broken down. Either their beef was very cheap, or the ribs needed more time in the crockpot. Furthermore, they've loaded up the sandwich with this horseradish mustard, which I was really looking forward too. However, when mixed, Grey Poupon and Horseradish create a tart, overbearing taste, taking away from the meat. A good deli mustard and a little bit of horseradish would have been a better choice to bring out the flavor. In essence, this sandwich pretty much tasted like something that would be served at Penn's 1920 Commons. My side salad was decent, coated an interesting, yet tasty thai lime yogurt dressing.

I tasted my friend's flounder sandwich, and it was quite good, leading me to believe that at least some of the new menu was decent. On further thought, however, I realized that Marathon is sending mixed signals. Their new comfort foods are good, because Marathon is good at comfort foods. That's their thing. When they try to fancify foods, they tend to mess up. Hence I don't think I'll be trying the curried turkey salad on walnut bread with a beet and feta salad on the side.

Marathon, do me a favor and bring back the cheesesteak... this is, after all, Philadelphia.