| rev:text
| - We've been to Music Box Supper Club 3-4 times now, so it's time for a review.
As a music venue, I'm pretty pleased. The sound is good (actually great, if you choose the right seats and band). The first couple times we succumbed to the temptation to sit right in front of the stage, but the sound is awful there, not surprisingly. Last night we saw one of our favorite bands, which we've seen in a million other places, but we chose to sit right behind the sound board. The combination of this location and the fact that the group had their own sound guy who ran the house board added up to an amazing sound.
The size of the venue is just about perfect...you can choose to be literally 5-ft away from the performance. Or you can choose to be way in the back, which will still provide a solid sound and allow you to see everything. There really aren't any bad seats.
The menu seems to be somewhat schizo. Every time we go it's changed. Admittedly, the venue is still relatively new and maybe they're still trying to find their way. But don't count on getting an entree you liked last time.
On our last visit, our friends (who are elite beer snobs) ordered beers based on our waitress's description, but when they arrived, they both said those descriptions were highly inaccurate and they wouldn't have ordered those beers if they'd known what they were getting.
I ordered a gin and tonic, stressing that if the waitress couldn't guarantee that there'd be at least SOME alcohol in it, I'd prefer a glass of wine. "Oh, it's ALL alcohol," she assured me. She lied.
My wife and I ordered the fried calamari appetizer, which had a great flavor (pretty much all garlic, but it's hard to go wrong with fried garlic anything) but the calamari was about 5% of the entree; the rest is breading. Toward the end we all rowed through the pile of breading on the plate, looking for any calamari. It tasted yummy, but they could've brought us a plate of fried breading and it would've been pretty much the same.
Last night's menu was weird. While they had the usual choices of proteins, their sides were oddly paired in just about every case. Asparagus was big last night; just about every entree came with it. Which is great, if you like asparagus. Half of our party didn't. When we asked if we could switch things up a bit, our waitress, who seemed somewhat confused by the menu herself, said they didn't allow that. What?
Our wives got the beet salad, which turned out to be a limp plate of greens surrounded by whole slices of beets and a large scoop of something no one (including our waitress) could identify. She eventually hypothesized goat cheese and, while both wives agreed that this might be the case, they also said it was the strangest goat cheese they'd ever tasted, and an all-around weird choice in that entree to begin with.
I got the half-chicken. The chicken was a fairly tiny squab, about the size as a Cornish hen. It's smothered in a creamy sauce, which is where all the flavor comes from. It was cooked pretty much to death, but since it was swimming in sauce you didn't notice much. It came with an unremarkable scoop of rice flavored with a mild horseradish. Meh.
Okay, the service. Our waitress acted like she was new, but I don't know if she was. She kept mentioning that the menu was new and she hadn't memorized anything yet, so pretty much any question necessitated a trip to the kitchen to get answers. Which was usually "No". She didn't have the right answers for the food, she didn't have the right answers for the beer. Maybe it was just her, I don't know.
There were a lot of waiters/waitresses. At one point my wife said, "I think there's as many wait staff as customers here." And they're all milling around, checking drink levels, though they seemed to have sporadic accuracy; my wife got 3 diet Cokes in 10 minutes and finally had to tell them to stop, while my water sat empty for half the meal. With the blizzard of waitrons replenishing drinks, bringing food, taking plates, and always asking, "How're we doing here?" it was somewhat frenetic. There are places where having everyone checking on every table works....but this isn't one of them. MBSC is trying very hard to be upscale, and that requires a relaxing atmosphere. Instead, it's like being in a busy breakfast diner.
And finally, there seems to be an odd reservation function going on here. It's a Supper Club, right? We bought tickets for our show well in advance, but I got an email the day before the show reminding me to make reservations. Why? Aren't purchased tickets enough?
So, my advice to MBSC would be:
1. Reign in your chef's creativity. Less fru-fru, better food, better cooking skills. $25 for a pork chop is fine, if it's good. And asparagus for every entree? Really?
2. Fix your reservation system. It's weird.
3. Review your staffing. Less people but better utilization. You won't be around long with that overhead.
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