I really don't want to hate on dining in the suburbs, but every time I go home to MD, I just never seem to get any good food (except for the usual pho, dim sum and sushi faves). Sadly the Rock Bottom Brewery is no exception. Most of my friends and I were in town for reasons I won't go into detail about here but we all took the opportunity to grab our first non-Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner in years which was really nice.
Rock Bottom started off good enough...we were able to snag a table for 10 people outside in the patio area, so it was really relaxing to be able to drink and eat outdoors. As you can imagine the menu here is your basic bar/brewery food: burgers, sandwiches, pizzas, salads, mac and cheese, etc. I forgot that at restaurants like this, they show you the calorie count and we spent about 15 minutes screaming at how horrifying and absurd some of the counts are. How in the world is a salad 1600 calories?! Frightening. I ended up getting the spinach salad which came with feta cheese, bacon, egg, mushrooms, red onions and croutons tossed in a "Tangy Vinaigrette" dressing ($9.95). When the salad came out, it was so underwhelming. I know, how exciting can salad get but I've had some pretty damn good salads in the past. This looked like something I make at home. The bacon wasn't really very crispy and the onions looked like they were cut by a 2 year old (they were too thickly cut). You'd think that a vinaigrette would be similar to an oil and vinegar dressing but this was some weird thick orange dressing with lumps in it. After tasting it, it actually wasn't that bad, it tasted more like a ginger carrot dressing. It was just a very uninspiring meal. I didn't try anyone elses food but they all looked pretty sub-par, except for Jane's pizza. It actually looked gooey and tasty. Baby Jane got the kids mac and cheese and it was literally neon orange. I'm almost 100% sure it came from the Kraft powdered mac and cheese box that I used to make as a kid.
Another reason for the 2 fork rating was the service. I'll give our waiter credit that manning a 10 top is most likely his worst nightmare and he looked about 15 years old. And he was very sweet in accommodating lots of our off-menu requests. But he was constantly forgetting things (Meredith's mayo and Martha's avocado are two examples) or mixing up our orders (giving me someone else's beer) and then disappearing for long stretches of time. It was almost comical how this place just epitomized sub-par suburban chain restaurant dining. But the location is great and the company of good friends in the sun was the best. Bethesda has tons and tons of restaurants but this is probably a place I'd stick to just beer.
Photo Credit: Yelp
No comments:
Post a Comment