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| - For all the talk I've heard about this place, I expected something amazing. Perhaps it was oversold.
The boyfriend and I found ourselves with a free lunch hour driving around Tempe when it hit me that we should try out a place that's been talked up to me for ages. So, we headed right over.
First of all, parking is non-existent. We drove around the block and still never could find anything that indicated we were allowed to park there without risk of being towed. We finally settled on parking on the street out front, but had it been anything other than 11 am, there probably wouldn't have been a spot.
We were greeted and seated immediately, and service was fine. It's a rather cavernous room with an old warehouse feel to it. I'm fine with that. It doesn't seem to be air conditioned, though, and we were relying on heavy duty fans that kept blowing away the napkins to keep us cool on a hot AZ July day. Probably not the best choice for summer.
The menu options looked so good when I checked out the website on the way over, but both of the sandwiches we ordered were less than spectacular.
We ordered the Tap Room Tenderloin and the Salmon BLT and split them. The combination of bleu cheese, onion straws and garlic-jalapeno aioli sure sounded like it'd be bursting with flavor, but it was undeniably bland. Neither one of us could even taste the tang of the bleu cheese and there was not even a little kick from the aioli. The blt was just as sorry. Where the tenderloin was lacking in flavor, the salmon made up for it and then some. Someone was a bit heavy-handed with the cajun seasoning and the salmon just came off overly salty. I don't remember tasting any pesto in the mayo.
As we were there so early in the day, we did not have a drink, but it might be better to go back with our bellies already full and give them a shot.
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