Thursday, March 05, 2009

Feldan's Pizza, Pasta & More

Today's lunch plans were derailed when StfRon called me en route and said that Feldan's was open.
I've been watching Feldan's Pizza, Pasta & More make progress on the former Ned Kelly's building at 4114 N. Brandywine Drive in Peoria for a few months now.
Turns out that yesterday was their first day of business.
Knowing that in advance, I might not have gone today. I usually like to give new restaurants a few weeks to work out the kinks.
I needn't have worried here, though.
Walking in, I was immediately greeted by a cheerful gal who welcomed me. StfRon checked out the buffet and said that's what he was going to have, so I decided to do the same. We paid our $10.59 each (includes buffet and drinks between 11 a.m.-4 p.m.) plus tax and went for round one.
In the center of the buffet area there is a salad bar with an iceberg lettuce and red cabbage mixture, matchstick carrots, peas, croutons, cheddar cheese, cottage cheese, red onions and more, flanked on the left by dressings. I put a drop of one of the white dressings on my plate to sample, lest I be taken aback later by Bleu cheese, and found it to be ranch, but a much better ranch that most salad bar fares. StfRon later said the French dressing was very good, too.
On the opposite side of the veggies there were some fruit selections, two potato salads and white cake.
The buffet manager was on hand checking temps on the food, and everything was fresh and hot.
For round two, I sampled the fried chicken, breadsticks, pizza and a Feldan's roll.
The fried chicken was hot and juicy, with a nice crisp coating that appeared to have cornmeal in it. It wasn't salty, and was very good.
The breadsticks were chewy and the accompanying marinara was herbed and flavorful.
The roll was sweet, hard on the outside and soft inside.
The pizzas I tried were the orange chicken and Hawaiian. The Hawaiian was good, but the orange chicken pizza knocked my socks off. The orange was not prominent, but the pizza had lots of herbs on it and the sauce had a nice sweetness. I would certainly order a whole pie of that!
StfRon loved the pizza sauce and crust.
I went back one more time to take a small piece of the dessert pizza, and snagged a piece of cheese pizza while I was at it. The cheese pizza was fine, and the dessert pizza tasted almost like a homemade Snickerdoodle cookie.
We passed on several other items like pastas, green beans, two kinds of soup, mashed potatoes (skin on), corn flake fried chicken and more.
Throughout our visit a friendly server kept checking on us and whisking away our used plates.
The decor has been brightened with lots of white paint since Ned Kelly's closed, and train pictures are placed throughout the dining area. The tableside menu enlightened us on the fact that trains were selected as the theme in order to bring back hospitality from days gone by. And I would say they are doing a great job of that based on my experience today. Everyone was very cordial, friendly and helpful.
Feldan's has a dinner buffet as well for a couple dollars more, plus you can order wings, sandwiches, chicken and pizzas and an express lunch (11 a.m.-2 p.m.) off the menu.
Each day the buffet features specials, such as pork Adobo and sweet brown sugar ham.

2 comments:

Mike Starnes said...

We ate at Feldan's on 5-30-09. All 3 of us who dined there agreed that it would be our 1 and only visit. The pizza was bland and boring, and the other offerings were nothing special. For 10 bucks we could have went to one of the local Chinese buffets and had a much better dinner. Not worth a visit at all. 2 people in our party listed Feldan's as the worst buffet they had ever been to.

Rebecca said...

We ate at Feldan's on July 03/09. My boyfriend and I decided to try the buffet. Well we started with salad first, they ran out of lettuce and there was No cucumbers, croutons, olives,onions tomatoes and they ran out of salad dressing! So then we tried to get the hot food and to our surprise, there was NO paste, NO chicken or anything else ready. Then they were bring out pizza, but only half full. We took one taste of the pizza and it tasted like card board, no flavor at all. We just paid $22.00 dollars for a very small plate of lettuce and one bland piece of pizza. Do not waste your money, go to McDonald's or Burger King, at least you will know the food will be hot, tasty and plenty to eat. We went and talked to one of the gal's that was working there and found out that there was only two cooks working in the back preparing the food, unbelievable! There was hardly any customers there and they could not keep up at all, what would they had done if they had really been busy? Where the hell was the OWNER? Unable to be found!