While I share this particular vision, I fear that in the meantime, we're just going to have to settle for Yet Another Irish Pub By the Harbor until then.

Don't get me wrong, there are a few I quite enjoy. I just don't need thirty of them.

The review typifies the positive energy that EL brings to her job. She wasn't thrilled by everything she ate at Maisy's. But she wants the restaraunt to succeed, offering the kitchen some sensible suggestions and her readers reasons to give it a try. That makes the review of value to both.

Although I have never been to this restaurant, I take issue with your comment that the desserts must have come from Sysco. As a matter of full disclosure I work for Sysco and am very proud of it. For your information, Sysco is a food DISTRIBUTOR and does not make anything that they deliver. I am tired of seeing you and other so-called food "experts" using Sysco as a euphemism for mediocre food and the cause of the "dumbing down" of the American restaurant. There are some restuarant that just don't have the staff (or talent) to make desserts from scratch. For those restaurants, Sysco as well as many of my competitors offer some high quality ( as well as some inexpensive) desserts. You have reviewed many of my customers where you have raved about their desserts. Guess where they got the ingredients from to make those desserts...That's right...they came from Sysco!!

Please only hit post once, even if you're upset with me. Thanks. EL

I don't think I would be alone in saying that I would prefer a house-made dessert over a prepared desert any day of the week. As "high quality" these prepared dishes may be, I'll take decent house-made over "high quality" prepared 9 times out of 10. I would also find it hard to take seriously future reviews if I chomped down on something that was recently released from it's vacu-seal, and that information wasn't provided in a review. Sysco has it's place in the food industry - places trying to be more upscale is not that place.

sorry for the double post.....
I couldn't agree with you more that I would prefer a "house-made" dessert over a commercial one...IF the restaurant has the talent and resources to pull it off. My point was not to blame the "messenger" for a restaurants choce of what to serve. Sysco proudly serves most of the finer food establishments....selling them the ingredients to make some of the most creative dishes you are likely to find.

There's a big difference between selling the ingredients and selling the dessert.

I think when she says "desserts from Sysco" she's not talking about desserts made from ingredients delivered by Sysco. And I think you know that.

I ate dinner at Maisy's last night and enjoyed it enough to plan on returning. We arrived at about 6:45 and were asked where we'd like to sit... with our choice being any table in the house, since it was empty. (Is Thursday only the New Friday in the summer?) By the time we finished, maybe three more tables showed up, but the bar was fairly full with people eating. I had the Angus burger medium-well, maybe cooked slightly passed, but extremely juicy and tasty. I was excited about the sweet potato chips, but I would have preferred if they were either cooked (baked? I believe) less or sliced thicker. They were very lightly salted, no sugar. With those "buts" it still hit the spot, and I would agree with your assessment of it as a standy restaurant for nights when you just want to eat out.

Richiesdad, I commend you for being out of the cupboard. This spring on Chowhound, your colleagues challenged our use of Sysco to mean factory food, but were less forthright in what is apparently a corporate crisis management effort online. I think those of us passionate enough about food to read and post online about it will agree that it's not Sysco repping various lines or even your highly-processed, shelf-stable, cost-leader house brands, or the market you manipulate forcing restaurants to cut corners and serve pre-made soups, breads, cakes, and other industrially-prepared and frozen foods that have lowered the amount of fresh goods we end up eating, but that Sysco is the enemy of individual operators, the ones we see buying local produce at farmers markets and who use locally-sourced meats, cheeses and even shrimp. By buying local distributors all over the US and raising the minumum delivery charge--ten years ago it was $150, now you force some to order $700-- owners have vastly decreased distributor choice, decreased product diversity and raised prices. To minimize the amount of corporatese noise to come and cut to the chase, here's the tail end of the rant on Chowhound against the Sysco kids, keeping in mind we know that in Maryland, Sysco merged distributors, knocked others out of business, force smalltime owners to come to Jessup to pick up because they can't afford or have room to store the minimum order, don't have the previous selection of salespeople competing to keep prices down and do favors, and that Sysco was involved in a little fish scandal linked below:
...let's just welcome an important part of the DC-Baltimore restaurant industry and see if we can have some discussions that could benefit both Chowhounders and smalltime chefs without getting into the merits of restaurants using pre-made foods that Sysco sells so much of instead of cooking ingredients. What additional will Sysco do to help small operators? Will they arrange closer regional pickup points? Will they ship small orders by UPS? Will they certify fish like grouper with DNA testing to protect operators from fraud charges? We might agree that in addition to carrying many brands, across many categories, Sysco sells its own private-label brand, so I think your defense of them in this is a good place to start. Are they as good as the name brands, say, in cookies? Are we eating them thinking the restaurant baked them but just warmed them up? Can Sysco help small operators learn how to bake their own? Would Sysco develop a program to demonstrate to small operators how to cook the food of their country or specialty cost-effectively from scratch on-site using Sysco ingredients instead of pre-made components? Would they do this at the workplace between lunch and dinner so the cooks wouldn't have to leave? I think all of us Chowhounders could agree that diversity and supporting small family-owned restaurants and small foodstuff supply companies, including Sysco's competitors, is a good way to have a fair and balanced marketplace with restaurant owner choices so we can all get something tasty to eat that isn't just warmed up food pre-made far away.

Here's a couple cases where Sysco was caught selling fake fish:
http://www.tampabay.com/news/article795409.ece
http://www.wcnc.com/6newsextra/investigators/stories/wcnc-052107-jmn-fish2.934c5a34.html

Chowsearch, that was a fine rant, but it would have been a heck of a lot easier to read if you'd have put in the occasional paragraph break.

This isn't the first time Sysco has come up, and we've had all that information before, chowsearch.

I'm no fan of Sysco and their corporate practises, but I can't help but wonder if you've mistaken D@L for Chowhound?

I apologize for the 3AM rant, but this Sysco online employee advocacy program is a shill, a big, multi-location one, and you know how they get us going. And I have directly heard small restaurants out of business cite the delivery charge and costs issue, so I did not want their PR effort to go unchallenegd. Maybe if they had just named the conglomerate "American Heritage Kitichen", it wouldn't have turned out this way. Sysco has such a perfect industrial unwarm sound to it to conjure up factories we might see on the NJTurnpike..a good name for a janitorial paper goods company. I'll use paragraph breaks in future.