Donald Sacks Lunch @ WFC: Save Your Money

At Just-a-Sec, we love being able to recommend a great lunch spot. And when we walk into a restaurant we've never been to before, we genuinely want to love it.

Unfortunately, that did NOT happen at Donald Sacks in the World Financial Center.

I went with a small group of people from my office, as a farewell lunch for a departing co-worker.

We ordered an assortment of appetizers for the table that included mozzarella sticks ($12.00) and chicken quesadillas ($11.00). Nothing unique or earth-shattering; your ordinary TGIFridays kind of fare. But they weren't even tasty ordinary fare. The mozzarella sticks tasted like something out of a cardboard box in the frozen foods section of the local supermarket; the quesadillas were bland and slapped together with obvious apathy.

For my main course I had the Chicken Marsala. The co-worker sitting next to me had the same. As I ate the first few bites, I noticed the chicken was actually difficult to cut because it was so rubbery. Rubbery and slimy and slippery with marsala sauce. Then my neighbor leaned in and asked me,

"Is it just me, or is your chicken like rubber?"

The Chicken Marsala entree -- alone -- was $24.50. For lunch.

Maybe that's pocket change for some, but on the average secretary's salary, it's way too much for rubbery chicken.

And if you're a suit with money to burn, may I point out that spending any amount of money on garbage like this doesn't make you impressively wealthy; it just makes you unintelligent.

And the desserts -- well, let me just say this. We're a dessert-loving group. We always order them and we practically lick the plates clean. When our waitress at Donald Sacks brought around a tray of dessert samples to tempt us, we ordered one of everything to try.

It says a lot that we left more than half of each cake and pie wedge behind. In particular, we joked that the carrot cake tasted like a sample that had been used three days running. It was disgustingly dry and stale.

And the service wasn't so hot either. We weren't visited between the delivery of our courses. We were essentially forgotten about.

Don't waste your hard-earned money at Donald Sacks. Trust me, you won't be "treating yourself" there. If you're going to dine in the World Financial Center, there are far less disappointing places, like Au Mandarin and P.J. Clarke's. Skip Donald Sacks. It's overpriced and underwhelming in every regard.