Now on to the sides, where things get … controversial.

If you are unaware Mrs. Parmas have a shared sides system. The parmas come out as pictured above, on a big plate, all alone. Then you are delivered your sides - A bowl of salad and a bowl of chips - However they aren’t your chips and salad - They are the communal chips and salad for the table.

And for 10 years the shared sides at Mrs. Parmas has been their biggest issue.

The sides are good! The chips are hot, liberally salted with chicken salt, crunchy on the outside and crisp on the inside - Honestly top notch chips, and the salad is everything you would want from a garden salad to break up your meal a little.

Rather than re-tread the same content, I’ll just copy a paragraph that I wrote when we visited in 2012

The whole act of sharing two bowls of chips between seven people is just awkward. Sure we’re all friends, but putting communal chips brings up all sorts of social questions - are fingers okay? What if I take too many and don’t leave enough for everyone else? who gets the last chip? can I put sauce on them? To keep the obscure movie references going I felt like I was in a cruel “Cube“-like social experiment where one wrong move could get my face burned off with acid.

First of all, how good is Cube? Such a good movie and still holds up.

Secondly, the sentiment above still stands. I feel like the experience at Mrs. Parmas gets less enjoyable the more people you have in your party as the more people you have the more the shared sides system is exacerbated. We had 15 people in our party and we were served with three bowls of chips and three bowls of salad, and they were emptied within minutes, leaving some people in our group who didn’t act fast enough without anything.

Now, I have always been told that refills on chips and salad are free, last trip we didn’t say anything and waited to see if we were offered a refill … that refill never came. So this time around we actually asked for a refill of our chips.

And to Mrs. Parmas credit, they came, three (smaller) bowls of chips were delivered to the table - However it took them a good 15 minutes to arrive. The extra chips arrived after we had finished our parmas, after the staff had cleared our plates.

I’ll go deeper in this in the “Value” discussion below, but for $27.50 shared sides just seems like a bit of a rip off and after 3 reviews of Mrs. Parmas now it still doesn’t sit well with us.