Hughes Catfish Inn
Hwy 59
Goodrich TX
I went on an enjoyable 3-day weekend to the lake with my sister & my nephew.First night there, we needed to go get some food to cook, so we decided to eat out. We studied the situation very carefully by looking at the parking lots of all the restaurants we passed. No cars = crappy food. Lot of cars = good food. Well, that logic works in THEORY only. We stopped at the restaurant that had the most cars of any along that section of 59. This place was buzzing. The name was Hughes Catfish Inn. Sounds promising. MY SISTER said "I'm in the mood for some good catfish".
When we walked in the door, this place was packed to capacity. There were people spilling out everywhere. Every table, every booth, every nook & cranny. The dining room looked like a fricking ant bed. Right off, THE NEPHEW & I went to wash our hands. I like to think that you can tell a lot about a restaurant from how clean they keep their bathrooms. Washing our hands, checking out the shitter...me and THE NEPHEW got some hinky vibes. The bathroom was crusty and musty. I felt like my hands had more bacteria on them AFTER I left this shithole than before I got there. I should have just broke & run for the hills. But I tried to cowboy up and make the best of the situation.
The dining room was huge. Kind of dark and scary. All over the walls were hanging stuffed animal heads. Deer, goats, hogs, gazelle, bison...you name it...they killed it. There was some much dead stuff hanging around, it looked like Jeffrey Dahmer was the interior decorator. There was even a MYSTERY ANIMAL that someone had invented that was part of a deer head and a deer ass sewn together to make an unidentifiable yet scary as hell THING. (Maybe when we saw the deer ass used as decoration, we should have known to get the hell out). "Dumb Ass DNA" must run in our family. THE NEPHEW got shrimp. They tasted exactly like those frozen kind from the grocery store. The ones that are all crust but not crunchy and the shrimp is mushy. My sister ordered the stuffed crab & stuffed shrimp. I ordered the catfish. (We decided to split our dinners so we would get more variety). The dinners came with a salad and baked potato. We were happy about the baked tater cuz they be so tasty. Well, the service sucked. Everybody in the place (even people arriving AFTER us) got waited on before we did. Guess TOURIST was written on our foreheads. (I think my sister had on a top that said "I went to Cut-N-Shoot & all I got was this dar
n t-shirt")
n t-shirt")<----The catfish were about the size of GOLDFISH
<-----Notice the onion & pickles? Is this a fricking sad dinner?
They brought the food out. I don't know what the hell these people were thinking. Nestled up beside the seafood on the plates were a slice of onion and some pickles. I had to re-check the restaurant sign to make sure we weren't at a BBQ joint. I have eaten a whole lotta seafood in my time and NEVER...NEVER...EVER have I seen it garnished with onion & pickles. A sprig of parsley, maybe. Somebody needs to tell Red Lobster & Joes Crab Shack that they're doing it WRONG. And the slice of onion was so old & dried up that it had a chalky white film across it. That thing was older than my cooder...and it smelled ALMOST as bad.
When the waitress left the food, she said "Oh, you need a condiment tray" for our baked potatoes. This consisted of a set of 3 metal bowls on a hanger. The idea was kind of artsy fartsy. Having your own condiments at the table. BUT WAIT! She reached over to the adjoining table and took the USED condiments and gave them to us. The 3 bowls consisted of: cheese, green onions & bacon bits. These restaurant people must buy their onions from the YEAR-OLD SHOP. These green onions were so dried up that they looked dehydrated. They weren't even green anymore. It looked like something that MOSES threw outta his lunch over 2000 years ago. And the shredded cheese...wasn't even there. Obviously the people at the other table liked them some cheese. The whole concept of giving me someone else's food is just nasty. You have no way of knowing what kind of shenanigans went on with that food at that table. That is unsanitary. We ate the potatoes dry. It was the safer option.
<---Where the hell is the cheese?????
My catfish tasted OK. While eating it I tried not to look at the insides because every piece looked like it had grayish clotted vertebrae in the middle. It was boneless. What the hell was looking like a fricking bone? MY SISTER's stuffed shrimp was a joke. The stuffing on it & in the crab was Stove Top. Right outta the box. I peeled the stuffing off the shrimp and the shrimp itself was almost invisible. And flat. Flounder are flat, not shrimp. My sister placed it on a Sweet-N-Low packet to show the actual size.
<---Smaller & flatter than a SWEET-N-LOW
The stuffed crab did not have any crab in it. There were red bell peppers in there that "looked" like crab...but no crab MY SISTER didn't like the tea either. Actually, none of us liked anything about any of this. MY SISTER said that the portion size was so small that it "wouldn't even make a turd". That might be true, but it did give us some horrendous gas. I think we blew another hole in the ozone layer. So if you are ever in the Livingston area and want to be thoroughly disappointed, creeped out and disgusted all at the same time...stop by Hughes Catfish Inn. But when you go home crying because you're hungry and then fart like a mule for the rest of the night, don't blame me. I WARNED YOU!
Hughes Catfish Inn gets an EYEBALL DOWN from JudgedByJody!
I have driven by that place 100 times and I've never stopped to eat there. I salute you, and thank you for saving me from having to wonder if it was any good!
ReplyDeleteI've been going to this resturant for over 20 years. I must agree with you about the food. In the past 5 to 7 years this place has become down right gross! This use to be a GOOD place to eat. We would tell everyone how good it was and our family and friends would drive miles to eat here. Over the years the catfish has become smaller and the quality of food not good as well. The owner (Mrs.Hughes) monitors peoples food when you get the all you can eat, which is very unprofessional. To tell the truth you should'nt be so critical when the food sucks, and your business is not doing as weel as it use to. Sad to say, I will never eat here anymore. I can only hang on to my memories when my family would gather and the food was good.
ReplyDeleteI haven't eaten here is a very long time maybe 5 years ago. It use to be a great place to eat. I worked local and would order to go lunches then go and pick them up and we enjoyed them. Maybe the owners are getting a little tight with their food and where they are buying it. I can see from these reviews it sure has changed.
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