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Pete Tittl: Quality ingredients at Stars Celebrity Lounge take a bow
| Monday, Oct 6 2008 6:10 PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, Oct 7 2008 7:40 AM
So, if you have to go downtown to buy tickets to one of the shows at Stars Dinner Theater, it might be a good idea to do what reader Lenetta Cloud did. She and her husband went to get tickets to the Marilyn Monroe show and made a lunch date out of it in the Stars Celebrity Lounge, the bar restaurant adjacent to the main room at the Chester Avenue facility.
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1931 Chester Ave.
325-6100
Hours: Lunch 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Friday
Prices: Sandwiches $7.99-$8.99, pizzas $8.99, omelets $8.99, soups and sides $2.60-$3.60, salads $8.99. No child’s plate
Payment: MasterCard, VISA and personal checks accepted. Does not accept American Express, Discover or The Californian’s Press Pass
Dress: Casual
Amenities: Wheelchair accessible; full bar service; some vegetarian options
Food: 3 stars
Atmosphere: 31⁄2 stars
Service: 3 stars
Next week: Sandoggies
Photos:
Diners enjoy lunch in the airy dining room of Stars Celebrity Lounge in downtown Bakersfield.
The bread is grilled, not toasted, on the pastrami sandwich. The fries are prepared in peanut oil, and you can taste the difference, Tittl says.
Show posters add a personal touch to Stars Celebrity Lounge, which is adjacent to a dinner theater.
Links:
- Want to find out which restaurants and businesses accept The Californian's Press Pass, your ticket to savings? Check out our map
- Read reviews of other restaurants Pete has visited
- It's too nice to eat inside. Check out Pete's picks for the best outside dining options, and add your own
- Check out restaurant ratings and reviews from community members, and add your own, at Bakersfield.com's Inside Guide to Dining.
“My husband said he really thought that the burger was amazing! I had an albacore tuna melt on sourdough and it was really good too!” she wrote.
The e-mail had come in response to my column on Tom’s Famous Burgers. I had to hustle on over there to see, recalling that I had good dining experiences when going to the shows at Stars.
It is everything she said and more, though we didn’t sample the hamburger from a menu that includes seven different big salads, fish and chips, pasta, and many other sandwiches. I instead ordered the pastrami sandwich ($8.99) while my companion selected the chicken stir fry ($8.99), one of the daily specials on the board. Both were superb.
The lounge is a high-ceilinged place with show posters and pictures of local actors in various shows on the wall. It’s a great place to hang out with friends and socialize after a show, but at lunch, when it’s all sunny and bright, it still seems like a friendly place. Plus, on a very hot day, it was very cool. And I love the emphasis on quality ingredients evident in what we sampled.
Someone who knows food is working back there in the kitchen.
It’s a small example, but a telling one. The menu said only 100 percent peanut oil was used for frying. I’ve been a longtime friend of peanut oil. It adds such a great flavor to anything. I love using it at home for stir fry.
To demonstrate the power of peanut oil, I got shoestring seasoned fries with my pastrami sandwich. Not fresh cut, nothing particularly distinctive. But they were fried in peanut oil. My companion, an occasional companion and not a dedicated foodie, was insisting that these fries were the best in town, the best he’s ever tasted. That’s what peanut does to potatoes, fish and almost everything else.
My companion’s chicken stir fry did not have the evident presence of peanut oil, but it did have fresh vegetables and nearly perfect rice. My pastrami sandwich was made on grilled rye (rather than toasted) and with pepper jack cheese.
Now they did have dessert, but I was eager to try the downtown cupcake place called Frosting Ink, 1818 G St., right near the downtown post office. We walked over and I marveled at the list of 36 different cupcakes, though unfortunately only six of them were available when we walked in the door.
Cupcakes are superhot right now in LA and New York, and it’s cool that Bakersfield has its own gourmet shop with such confections. I loved the butterfinger ($2), but thought the chocolate with white frosting was a tad dry. I can recommend the excellent macaroons with chocolate chips ($1.25) that were sinfully gooey on the bottom.
Getting lunch at Stars is just the excuse you need for a good cupcake dessert. The walk between the two locations will burn off the calories.