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| - This place was a joke. Talk about trying way to hard to be what some 55 year old guy in Scottsdale thinks is "cool" these days...
This is Urban Outfitters in restaurant form, which might be forgivable if the food was any good or the menu cohesive. For a "gastropub", the beer list was pretty pedestrian and the beer menu was inanely laid out. The menu was all about clever, pseudo-hipster layout and not at all about conveying information about the beers. On tap they have Lagunitas, but which Lagunitas? They make several different brews.
The food was again trying way too hard to be trendy. Unfortunately the gastropub trend jumped the shark 5 years ago, as evidenced by this pre-packaged chain restaurant. In fact I think that this incarnation of a gastropub, cooked up by some restaurant company in that culinary mecca (and launching pad of a dozen chain restaurant monstrosities) of Scottsdale, AZ, may be the ultimate and final indicator of the gastropub shark jump.
The douchey beats from the pool outside pound through the restaurant and are beyond annoying. The pretzels were stale and the cheese sauce they came with was grainy with too much flour in the bechamel. The chicken curry was laughably bland with a couple of strands of dried up chicken breast and no rice (i took this one to go.)
This place is so derivative and contrived. Simon Kitchen, First Food, and Society are already doing the comfort-retro food much better and don't need to package their menus in some goofy, obvious appeal to a specific demographic (except for First, which is itself an overly-conceived douchatoreum, but with slightly better food than CD).
The funny thing is that they are obviously trying to appeal to Brooklyn-hipster types, the exact people who wouldn't be caught dead in the HRH, let alone this charicature of a restaurant.
One extra star for the cool couches.
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