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| - I really, really wanted to like this place.
My boyfriend and I live right down the street from this place, so we'd been meaning to try it. We stopped in on a Tuesday night, and they had the patio open so we were seated outside. They had an extensive beer list, with a limited selection on tap. Our server was knowledgeable and encouraging about the food, which made me feel more confident that our dinners were going to be good. Unfortunately, we both didn't care for the food at all.
The menu choices sounded inventive and tasty, A for effort there. We got the fried pickle chips to start, as I'm a huge fan of fried pickles, and they were kind of a disaster. The pickle slices were wafer thin, almost McDonald's-esque, inside a thick mound of overly greasy fried batter. You almost didn't know the pickles were in there. If you want pickle chips, head to the Market in Rocky River - they're pretzel encrusted and they nail this appetizer.
For dinner I ordered the Farmhouse burger (fried egg, bacon, tomato, arugula) and my boyfriend got the Michael Slyman/Symon (not sure which it was called). The combos sounded really good. The burger patties themselves were really lacking - they were thin and neither of our burgers were cooked to our preference of medium and medium rare. With a burger so thin, I don't know how you could even achieve a warm pink center. I feel like I would have cut these burgers some slack if I wasn't at a full-blown burger restaurant. There are so many amazing places to grab a burger in this city, so if you're not going to do it well, you aren't going to last. Same goes for the duck fat fries--when there are places in Cle that nail duck fat fries, you can't just sprinkle dried rosemary on them and call it a day.
Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be back. It pains me to say it, so I hope they can make some improvements to their methods--maybe not try to hard to be inventive, just focus on making an incredible, juicy burger.
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