I had a hard time with this rating as my feelings on this place were as schizophrenic as the bar itself.
As a bar it gets 4 stars. The bartender was helpful and made some good suggestions and they have a wide variety of beers on tap.
As a bar / restaurant it gets 3 stars. The food was OK but nothing special. We had the chicken wings to start and had I only tasted BW3 wings up to this point I might have thought them well done. But I had gone to Greenhouse Tavern just the week before and their wings put these to shame. My fish was fine and fresh, but nothing outstanding. No zing. No pop. Nothing to make it stand out from the norm. I sampled around the table and felt the same way about all the food...fresh and simple. But not the good "so well prepared and subtle that it comes off as simple but is really complex" but instead the "take a fresh piece of meat, put it on a wood fire grill, flip, serve" kind of simple.
As a restaurant this gets 2 stars. The service was awful. Not taking reservations gets -1 starts right off the bat. The hostess was incompetent. We sat (and sat, and sat...for an hour) and watched tables sit empty for 10 minutes before people were seated (remember, no reservations for less than 6 people so they couldn't have been waiting for someone). Every seating was a 2-3 minute conference with other staff members. Our waiter was so overwhelmed that he kept forgetting things and told us no less than 4 times how overwhelmed and flustered he was as an apology. The place had only been open for 90 minutes...he had several more hours to go I'm guessing. I pity his customers later in the evening if he was this brain dead by 7. After we had the wings, the busboy took our bread plates that had the bones on them (oh we didn't get plates with our app --- he apologized for that as well) and pushed the bones off with his finger onto another plate and set the bread plates back on the table. Classy.
As a Michael Symon restaurant this gets 1 star. I have been waiting for him to open a west side restaurant since I moved her 5 years ago. This isn't it. Seems I will have to wait a little longer.