There’s a restaurant in the area.
Salads and soups start at $13; appetizers at $20. Main courses are $34 – $39, and steaks $47 – $62. Actually, I’m not complaining at all about these prices. The web site lists 15 classic and signature cocktails, all in the $15 – $18 range.
That’s fine. The wine list is nicely balanced, with glasses running from $15 – $18, and bottles $50-odd.
No worries, but here is the beer list.
- Miller Lite $6.00, American light lager
- Michelob Ultra $7.00, American light lager
- Bud Light $6.00, American light lager
- Corona Especial $8.00, Mexican lager
- Modelo Especial $8.00, Mexican lager
- Blue Moon $8.00, Belgian wheat ale
- Guinness $9.00, Irish dry stout
- 3 Floyd’s Zombie Dust $9.00, American pale ale
Awful.
There are five light adjunct lagers (including the ones from Mexico), and one each wheat, dry stout and pale ale, although Zombie Dust probably is better billed as an IPA.
Are they available via draft or package? Nowhere does the website say; all we can do is guess.
How are they being served? I don’t know, although visions of frozen shaker pints haunt my dreams. Blessedly, there is no mention of “ice cold,” the most Pavlovian two words in the American English language.
Granted, it’s probably not possible to have rational discourse with anyone who’d spend $100 on a steak, salad and appetizer, then wash it down with Miller Lite. That’s just demented.
I like the people at this particular establishment, and that’s why I’m staying mum. Everything I’ve heard about the food is positive. Then again, this selection of beers is insipid. I’m hesitant to go there precisely because the beer list presents me with a stilted range of inadequate (if not insulting) options.
It wouldn’t take much to improve. Throw in a full-flavored all-malt lager, a brown or red ale, and something truly high end and purely magnificent with cuisine of this nature, like Chimay Grand Reserve, and we’re getting somewhere. Educate the staff, then be known as the rare swanky joint that actually gets it.
Unfortunately, when neither establishment nor customer gets it, and wholesalers merely take orders without having any interest in assisting accounts, this is what we get.
Mediocrity.
An hour on the internet, and almost anyone can do better. And yet it’s so very rare.
Sadness.
For a while there, I thought progress was being made.
