Chili's, Hadley, MA

Death Cake and I went and enjoyed ourselves over some awesome appetizers and phenomenal conversation, as is the norm, at Chili's. We split the Southwestern Egg Rolls and the Chocolate Lava Cake for dessert.
The SER were tasty. DC and I were somewhat split on the dough on the egg rolls, as it wasn't authentic. It was a lot flakier, like a phyllo dough, than a chewy egg roll dough, and much less greasy. I was sort of on the fence, but Death Cake was a fan. The filling is all right, it's a spicy mixture of beans, corn, a salsa mix. It was very hot, and I wish there had been more congruency in between the ingredients, because it tasted like they had just been mushed together and were one large mass of spiced and patented Chili's appetizer success story. The spices were good, not too spicy, and I did like the cilantro added to the egg roll. The concept is there, it just needs work.

As for the avocado ranch dip, it was really tasty and added a creamy and spicy kick to the bland and salty egg rolls.


As for the lava cake, it's really not bad. I like the ice cream, and I'm fickle about my ice cream. I generally don't like ice cream with most desserts, as I like ice cream either on its own or not at all.

However, the combination of different sauces, textures, and temperatures worked with this dessert better than the last lava cake I had at Chili's because of the ice cream, I think. The caramel sauce was a highlight to the dessert that I really ended up enjoying. There was also a magic chocolate shell that hardened on top of the ice cream that added a nice element to the chocolate cake. The cake itself was unimpressive, like the other. It soaked up a lot of the melted ice cream, though, and that made it really awesome, like a trifle, to eat. I still can't get over how it's more like a baby bundt cake with the lava filling in the middle.