Just look at the above picture. I don’t think I need to tell you that this is going to be a negative review. In fact, this may bottom out in spirit as the worst restaurant I have eaten at in the history of this blog. Yes, somehow worse than even the appalling Longwood Family Restaurant. A weekend getaway to the King of Prussia area of course led us to the mall. There are plenty of food choices in their food court and scattered around the property, but for a luxury mall, they seem to match what you would find anywhere else. There’s pizza, Chinese, smoothies, about 6,000 Auntie Anne’s Pretzel shops, and a couple of higher end, fine-dining establishments that I have tried to avoid like the plague here. Then there’s the Starburst Cafe. The outside had a cool, retro-looking neon sign. A limited menu, but cheap prices. What could go wrong?

My bottle of Aquafina water ended up being the highlight of the meal. Keep in mind, this is not a food court stand or a kiosk. It’s a restaurant. I would not have bothered otherwise. Because we are literally in the Philadelphia Metro area, I thought perhaps a cheesesteak would be in order. The lunch special for the day was a $5.99 chicken cheesesteak and fries combo. Honestly, I was not looking for anything spectacular. It’s a cheesesteak for goodness sake. But I digress: just take a look at the picture again! A tiny, limp loaf of bread so small it must have been custom-made, filled with probably an ounce of chicken and a half a Subway cheese triangle. No onions. No peppers (which I dislike anyway). No seasoning either. And by seasoning, I mean salt and pepper. None of that. Instead, guess what was rubbed on my chicken? OREGANO! Yes, the one herb I loathe to the point of nausea ended up in my cheesesteak. To give you an idea of how much chicken was on this sandwich, had it been marinated in a bath of salmonella and e coli, I still would not have gotten sick.

The fries also had no seasoning and were soggy. Then comes my friend’s quesadilla. I neglected to take a picture of it because it would have broken my camera. Decent sized, but literally, two tortillas stuffed with cheese and grilled for like 30 seconds. You could have plastered a wall with it. No seasoning…again, no onions or veggies of any kind…again. They gave him three plastic containers filled with sour cream, pico de gallo, and salsa. He didn’t even bother opening them because they had probably been sitting around for a week. It was so bad that we did not even leave angry. Instead, I looked at the food, looked at the paint peeling off the wall by our booth revealing insulation, and laughed.

It’s hard for me to call what we ate today “food”. I cannot believe a place like this could even exist for what the rent must be like at the King of Prussia Mall. The people cooking here have no idea what they are doing. That in itself is evident with botched orders of the two most simplistic sandwiches we could have gotten. I wonder what horror would have awaited me with a bacon cheeseburger. Please, just do yourself a favor and do not eat here. You know how mall Chinese restaurants usually have someone standing outside with those little toothpick  samples of grilled chicken? I would have rather eaten one of those off the floor than given my money to these idiots. 1 out of 5 stars, and that’s only because I swore when I created this blog that I would never give a 0. At least the bottled water was good.

The Starburst Cafe is located inside the King of Prussia Mall on 160 North Gulph Road.