Long Island Restaurants

The Melting Pot

Put a fork in The Melting Pot.

Last month, "the nation's largest fondue restaurant franchise" tied the chain around Route 110. It's a truly cheesy experience. And pricey, too.

The rote eateries have established themselves in 120-plus locations across the country. There are 24 alone in Florida, where The Melting Pot started bubbling in 1975, just before leisure suits peaked.

Fondue itself often is traced to "The Iliad." That one featured goat cheese and local wine. The resourceful Swiss made it through hard winters and harder cheeses with fondue. And a lot of parties in the '60s and '70s were fueled by the communal pot.

It is rare, however, to achieve the kind of meltdown under way in Farmingdale.

The Melting Pot arrives preprogrammed and robotic, in style and staff, from the moment you're led into the sprawling dining room of booths and banquettes. The centerpieces are tables equipped for cooking one or two fondues at a time.

There are rules, the main one being that one-burner tables have one pot. You'll have to be a very harmonious, flexible group.

Your best selections easily are the Gruyere-and-Emmentaler cheese fondue, with a glass or bottle of wine from the well-chosen list; and the least-complicated chocolate fondue for dessert.

But once beyond traditional cheese fondue, assuming the alcohol has burned off and the generic bread cubes aren't stale, The Melting Pot dips from the merely satisfactory to the insufferably awful.

Each polite, indoctrinated waitress perkily explains every item on the table. For the uninitiated: This is a potato.

With the monotony of a Miranda warning, after that come the descriptions of more than a dozen sauces that you can use to disguise all those exotic ingredients headed for the pot.

Be patient. After noting that the sequence must be raw-batter-cook, you're told the recommended cooking time for a color-coded forkful of meat, poultry or seafood is two minutes.

It's going to be a long night.

For the eatery's trademark "big night out," you have a respectable fontina-and-Gruyere fondue, followed by a refrigerator-cold "Athenian salad" that includes pepperoni, and main course options titled "fondue feast," "fondue fusion" and "lobster indulgence."

It's difficult to decide what's worse as you take uncooked beef, pork, chicken, shrimp, lobster tails, vegetables and pastas, impale all, batter some, and then send each to its salty destiny in a pot dubbed either "coq au vin" or "bourguignonne," "mojo style" or "court bouillon."

But when the batter falls off first and the meat, seafood or pasta slips away next, you're basically left with an ongoing search-and-rescue mission. The best advice: Cut your losses and your time - dump everything in and spear at random.

Slow-motion also applies to the "Pacific rim" combo for two, which highlights chewy teriyaki steak and fall-apart potstickers; and individual main courses, including "The French Quarter," with harshly seasoned shrimp, filet mignon, shrimp and andouille sausage.

These dishes could make you talk to yourself. Who else? You're the cook, right? So fast-forward to the dark chocolate fondue and the Oreo-covered marshmallows.

It's done.

Reviewed by Peter M. Gianotti, 12/20/07.

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