Despite my low rating, I am so glad that I came here for lunch on Friday instead of the usual awful PJ Clarke's option at work. Usually when we go for a nicer lunch at work, we end up at PJ's and it just always a terrible experience. Now that Goldman has opened across the street, there are a few more options such as Blue Smoke and North End Grill, but BLT is also a nice option on the other side of the building.
We came here as part of my "farewell" lunch at work since I'm moving on to a new role next week. Since we were such a large group, we ordered a ton of appetizers to start and then each ordered an entree (which was totally unnecessary - I'll explain later). We got the tuna tartare ($16), fried calamari ($11), marghertia pizza ($12), heirloom tomato pizza ($15), sausage and broccoli rabe pizza ($14), polenta ($6), mac and cheese ($11), and the chopped salad ($14). You'd think with all this food that we wouldn't need more food, but somehow we all thought that we needed our own entrees as well. I ordered the BLT Burger ($16) as did a lot of my other co-workers and some others got other sandwiches and pastas. Thank god for the appetizers as its what saved my meal. The tuna tartare was served in a cube with soy, wasabi, avocado base, and crispy shallots. It was a bit too chopped up that it made it hard to eat but overall the flavor was clean and refreshing. The calamari was ok, kind of bland but nothing terrible. I am a huge poletna fan, so I was pretty disappointed when this one wasn't very good. This one was served with aged cheddar, bacon and scallions and a LOT of salt. It was took one bite and couldn't eat another bite. It felt like I was eating a salt lick. The star of the appetizers has got to be the mac and cheese. It was served using penne pasta and lots lots of delicious cheese. It wasn't the gooey type of cheese, it was more similar to a gratin style cheese. It was heavy and clearly so bad for you but that's what makes it so yummy. Everyone else at the table loved it too. I also tried the sausage and broccoli pizza which was pretty good. It's a thin crust pizza and not heavy or greasy which you sometimes get when you order pizza. If I had ended my meal here, I probably would have given them 3 or even 3.5 Forks. What brought them all the way down to 2.5 Forks was what came during the entrees.
As soon as I saw my burger, I knew something was wrong. I ordered mine medium rare and this was beyond medium. It was close to being black and it was very dry. Also the burger was supposed to be served with aged cheddar, double smoked bacon and fries. Mine had no cheese and had sauteed onions instead. Luckily I like onions but these tasted over soaked in sherry wine. I'm so glad that I was full from the appetizers, otherwise, I would have been starving at lunch. I forced myself to eat at least half of it because otherwise I would have felt bad about wasting all that food. If we weren't in a hurry to get back to the office, I would have sent it back. The only saving grace of the dish was the fries. They were pretty salty but they were crispy and quite tasty. I later realized how salty my burger was too because I drank almost 3 pints of water as soon as I got back to the office. Another deduction was also due to the fact that they messed up 2 of my other co-workers burgers. My friend had ordered the BLT burger too but got the Blue Cheese Burger (same thing happened to my other co-worker). Messing up 1 order is bad enough but to mess up 3 people's orders is just a poor reflection of the restaurant.
Despite the bad burger experience, I would still come back for a work lunch since it's a much more pleasant experience than PJ Clarke's. The appetizers were good enough to encourage me to try it for another work lunch although I probably wouldn't come back for personal reasons.
Photo Credit: Yelp
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