July 19th. Lunch at Mustards Grill

Mustards Grill is a fun place. Chef is Cindy Pawlcyn. She of Top Chef fame who called Top Chef contestant Dave a "Pepper Monkey". The restaurant is described as "Truck Stop deluxe" in the Napa and Sonoma book we borrowed from Jen. That's accurate. We walked in without a reservation and got the very last available table for 2. Everyone after us was told the wait was 20 to 30 minutes! Of course it was right at lunch time. The place was very busy. Tables are somewhat close together, but it made for a nice ambience. Slightly loud but we could easily carry on a conversation. The menu is the same all day. No lunch or dinner menus. They have a standing menu and also a large chalkboard with lots of specials. Blues music, my fave!!!, was playing in the background.
It took a while, 10 minutes?, for someone to finally come to our table and take our drink orders. Cathy ordered iced tea, which is just Tejava brand tea poured from the bottle into a glass. Brewed tea is so much better than any bottled. Minor disappointment. I ordered Lemonade. It's made fresh when ordered. So, Cathy's tea and both of our glasses of water came right after ordering and I ended up waiting about another 5 minutes for my lemonade. Once service got started it went pretty well. Just waiting for drink orders took awhile.
They brought a nice crusty loaf of what seemed like a sourdough bread and some firm but spreadable butter. The loaf is sliced and it's just put right onto the table cloth. No basket or anything. Different kind of presentation.
We heard about their famous onion rings so we ordered an order of those. Extremely thin sliced rings. Literally paper thin. Coated with a thin, light batter. Fried and piled high on a plate and garnished with green onions. Served with an apple/tomato ketchup.
Cathy ordered a grilled chicken sandwich. It had the grilled breast, a green chile relish, guacamole and a melty white cheese. She wasn't sure of it's heritage. LOL. Sandwich also had some finely shredded cabbage and carrots. Like a coleslaw shred but without the dressing.
Her plate came with french fries. As did mine. More on the fries in a bit.
I ordered the slow smoked bbq pork sandwich. It came on a 6" sub style roll. Roll was a dark reddish color. Kind of different but tasty. Pork was absolutely perfect. Tender and juicy and lightly smoky. BBQ sauce was both sweet and spicy with neither dominating the other. Plate came garnished with the same kind of cabbage and carrot shred Cathy had on her sandwich, but mine had a light vinagrette dressing on it. Plate also came with a pile of shredded raw red onions and the ubiquitous fries. The fries were pretty average. We both sampled them and that was that. Besides we had those fab onion rings! I didn't even bother with the red onions on my plate because we had the onion rings.

The specials chalkboard was interesting. They had at least one special for each course of a meal. We were mostly interested in the "Root Beer" float for dessert. It's root beer frozen into a sorbet. Then layered with vanilla ice cream in a tapered glass. Served with long spoons for getting all the way to the bottom of the glass. It also came with a shortbread cookie. Very buttery and delish. It was a very refreshing dessert. They also do that dessert with orange soda. But today it was root beer. So, lunch was tasty. Service was great once it got going. Fries were just fries. And the tea should be brewed and not bottled. Definitely order the onion rings!!