We hope you have been enjoying your restaurant experiences from the privacy of your own quarantine shelters. In other words, how’s the take-out? Our experience has been good, until this week when we ordered from Avila’s Ranchero Restaurant. Avila’s is a Southern California chain and the only Mexican open anywhere around here. We placed our order through DoorDash because, due to a tough bike ride earlier in the day, we were too tired to walk to pick it up.

We ordered at 5:00PM and asked for the order to be delivered at 6:00. At 5:30, it was delivered, which means they didn’t read that part of the order. Nor did they read the part about making the fajitas with no peppers and onions.

Yeah, the meat was full of onions, with a couple of peppers thrown in. I got on the phone to Avila’s and tell them that they screwed up. After admitting their fault, they said I could come pick up a new order or they would refund my money. I asked for the refund, which was never issued, so I complained to DoorDash and got a partial refund. We picked out the onions and ate the fajitas, which came with tortillas, and they were very good…just not what we ordered.

Also on the order was a carnitas Baja bowl.

Chunks of pork came over rice with some avocado. If you look closely, you will see the mole sauce on the pork, which we ordered on the side. Although it was a bit spicy, it was good as well. They threw in a generous amount of chips. One bag was slightly stale, the other was very fresh. Go figure. We must have been very hungry, because there were no leftovers from this meal.

We give Avila’s four stars (out of five) for the food, but one star for the execution. Our advice: when things go wrong, make them right. Don’t accept bad takeout because you have no recourse. Call your restaurant and tell them how unhappy you are with screwed up orders. Give them a chance to make it right, and if they don’t, be done with them.

Rom-Com of the Week: Love, Wedding Repeat

Those of you who have Netflix have probably been inundated with emails about Love, Wedding, Repeat. It’s one of about a billion of the cutesy Netflix-produced rom-coms that they have been releasing in the past couple of years.

It stars a whole passel of people who make you say, “Where have I seen that guy/gal before?” The cast is good and mostly British. It’s produced by the Love Actually team, so if you like that one, you will probably go for this one too. It’s billed as a madcap comedy, which may be a bit much, but we did enjoy it. And at an hour and 40 minutes, you haven’t blown your whole evening on one movie.

Movie Find of the Week: The Wrecking Crew

What do The Beach Boys, Monkees and the Mamas and Papas have in common? They are some of the myriad of 1960’s rock artists who were backed in the recording studio by The Wrecking Crew.

Don’t confuse this with the 1968 Dean Martin movie with the same name. This 2008 documentary is on YouTube and is a must for anyone who plays an instrument or listens to ’60’s music. You will be amazed at what these studio musicians accomplished during their careers.

Film Noir of the Week: Scarlet Street

Apparently The Woman in the Window was such a big hit in 1944 that they remade the movie a year later with the same stars as Scarlet Street (available on YouTube on the Strand Marietta channel).

An older Edward G. Robinson falls for the much younger Joan Bennett, who is playing him along with bad guy Dan Duryea. Robinson looks a little bored in this movie, probably because he played basically the same role a year earlier. Bennett is a bit melodramatic, but Duryea shines as the sleazy bad guy. Like the first film, this movie was a hit, making over $1.5 million, which wasn’t too shabby for 1945, when the world was in black and white, and my mother was eight years old.