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| - The current Yelp rating here is 3.5. Sounds about right to me.
Freedom Beat is an American restaurant inside Downtown Grand. Our group of eight came here on a Sunday morning to try their brunch. This is an all you can eat brunch for $20 per person, and they bring out orders to your table so it's not a "buffet."
The wait was about 15-20 minutes to get seated. I wish that they'd had more consistently tolerable lighting, but our high tops were dimly light, whereas the rest of the place was brighter. It was hard to hold a conversation while resident musician Mahi Crabbe (yes, that's his stage name) was strumming and singing, but at least the music was surprisingly enjoyable.
The food, however, wasn't so good all-around. I'll list the dishes in order of the menu and describe them.
- Monkey Bread: served at the start with all AYCE brunches. Soft bread and good cinnamon and syrup flavor.
- Fruit Plate: didn't really have much of this, but also came with all AYCE brunches.
- Texas French Toast: we skipped this
- Silver Dollar Pancakes: unevenly buttered/syruped. Good when you did get those toppings, boring and merely OK when you didn't. I wouldn't get it again.
- Shrimp & Grits: surprise favorite. Deliciously sauced shrimp and flavorful, soft grits.
- Chicken & Waffles: pretty good overall, but I've had better chicken and better waffles.
- Biscuits & Gravy: half a biscuit? What gives? And it was smothered in gravy to the point where I couldn't say whether the texture had been damaged, but it wasn't great. The gravy wasn't outright bad but it wasn't as rich as you'd hope.
- Eggs & Potatoes: decent scrambled eggs, but the potatoes here and everywhere else didn't have enough salt. They were soft enough but I wished that they'd cut the potatoes into smaller pieces for more browning.
- Classic Benedict: perhaps my second favorite. Decent muffin, nice poaching of eggs, and good ham.
- Crab Cake Benedict: generic, overly salty crab cake.
- Pastrami Skillet Hash: no pastrami. Otherwise, it's a fried egg version of the Eggs & Potatoes, meaning that it was underseasoned.
- Jambalaya: didn't try this on our side of the table.
- Pot Roast Sliders: pretty good beef, but the fries were limp and underseasoned.
- Crispy Chicken Biscuit: didn't try after the poor chicken and biscuit experiences in other dishes.
- Chilaquiles: I've probably had better in a buffet. Scrambled eggs were Ok, but simply throwing those on top of tortilla chips and adding a medium spicy sauce screams lazy and uninspired.
- Fish & Chips: mushy, not flaky fish, not very crispy batter, and the same lackluster fries as above.
- Pigs in a Blanket: okay. Maybe even better than half of the dishes.
I don't see myself coming back to Freedom Beat any time soon. I'd rather have marginally inferior food at local casino breakfast buffets or significantly superior breakfast entrees at any number of restaurants than work my way downtown (even though they do validate for the Downtown Grand parking garage across the street) for maybe 3 or 4 worthwhile dishes.
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