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| - Tremendous new space and tremendous intentions do not translate into a tremendous experience.
Background: Been drinking craft beer since the late 80s rebirth, OMB from the outset of its founding. Still have an original growler somewhere. Yet this new brauhaus -- roughly down the street from the old -- has to go in the disappointment checkbox. And for the oddest of reasons.
It seems someone has elevated a parody of Teutonic aloofness and detachment to the new OMB standard. How else to explain menus, walls, anything devoid of info on the beers? The single POS station for a huge space? The frazzled servers just trying to make do rather than make good? Just not a good vibe.
It starts with staffing. If you are gonna have table service inside a space of this size you need a minimum of four waiters and four bussers/runners -- great that you have a guy floating around to "explain" the beers, but if you'd PRINT THAT info somewhere (and it looked like there was as empty space in the menus where that shoulda been on the Sunday afternoon we visited) then you can stick him back behind the bar.
Stress on the wait staff was evident from the dropped orders (my German potato salad I was really looking forward to got morphed into the house-made potato CHIPS, which are awesome and evil, but still) and the lost beer refill sales.
And the beer. Look, I love fresh, local craft beer. But. Somewhere along the way OMB has decided to up the malt and cut the hops. The beers are almost universally too sweet and flat -- at least this batch. The Mecktoberfest remains a decent take on the style, but maybe the move has jarred the output. Either that or stale kegs are not getting dumped in time -- dunno the exact deal, but overall the beer was only meh to good when it should be outstanding across the board.
What was outstanding? The German fare on the menu. Shockingly so. A brat that was actually cooked properly -- a little char, firm and rendered thru to the middle; not burnt and raw -- and crazy pretzel parts. Do start with a pretzel app ($3.50) to nosh, but skip the beer cheese add-on ($5.25) which was universally judged less interesting than the mustard, and save almost $2. The pretzel melt was high at $10 (Black forest ham, Swiss cheese & spicy mustard served in between a soft pretzel) but damn good. In retrospect, order a pretzel and two of the melts and a party of four can nosh and drink a good long, happy time.
Less successful was the Southwest turkey wrap ($9) primarily because the smoked chili sauce was insanely hot. A mystery on our visit -- all the wing options were X-ed out. Fine. But the takeaway remains -- go German on the munchies.
This space remains tremendously popular, even if I do not quite know why. Might be sustainable for a long time at current quality levels. Might not. I'll give it another go in a few months regardless.
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