Taphouse Grill (Seattle) Review

During my weekend with Gerry in Seattle, as part of the experience was to go to Bottleworks and buy and taste beer, we decided to check out the Taphouse Grill. We visited the location in downtown Seattle. Taphouse Grill's claim to fame is that they have 160 different beers on tap.

Writing a good restaurant review is easy, but writing a negative one is one fraught with a little more peril; it is not sufficient to just say bad things about a place, one has to be specific about what made the experience bad.

The easy rating is ambiance. The place has a nice atmosphere to eat and drink in, and there was nothing wrong with the decor. The pictures on the website paint an accurate picture.

However, everything went downhill from there.

Gerry and I arrived around 3pm, which is definitely the dead zone in the restaurant world. Our waitress was very friendly and nice enough, but service goes beyond ones individual server. My first mistake was to ignore Gerry's sage advice to not order the sampler. I'm used to samplers from places like Swan's, Wild River, Spinnaker's, etc - brew pubs where the samples are beers they brew. The sampler at the Taphouse was a mistake.

It was a mistake because of the four beers in the flight, one was off, one was flat, and one I didn't like. The one that was off had the classic wet cardboard aroma I've experienced with wine, but never with beer. Of course, Gerry's the beer expert, whereas I'm more of a wine guy. Also, none of the four beers in the flight was on the list of regular beers (they do say that some 10 or so taps are for whatever seasonal or special ales they have going).

I told the waitress to please take the flight away and bring me a glass of porter instead. She brought it back to the bar and Gerry and I saw the manager and she discuss my "concerns" and the manager even took a sniff of the off beer and make "that face" and put it down.

So when he came over and told me that all the beers "poured like they should" (i.e. that they were all ok), I knew he was lying. I didn't bother arguing - I just wanted my porter and my lunch.

And that was the other part. It took over an hour for Gerry and I to get out food. What did we order that took so long? I ordered the potato cakes and lentil soup from the daily specials menu, and Gerry ordered a beef dip sandwich. In other words, nothing that should take an hour.

When the food finally arrived, I was disappointed. The potato cakes were a little spongy, and the soup (very good) was only warm.

After the beer complaint, we were basically avoided by our waitress and she looked apologetic when she presented our bill. The faulty flight of beer was still on the bill, and I just gave her my credit card. When she came back she'd taken the flight off.

Too little, too late.

Ratings:
Service: 1/5
Ambiance: 3/5
Food: 5/10
Price: $$

Score: 9/20

A note: Having 160 taps is certainly impressive, but with that many, you're simply statistically going to have some bad ones there - especially since some of them won't be very popular. In contradistinction, as we went from the Taphouse to Elysian Fields, a brewpub right by Safeco Field, they have about 20 taps, but half of them are their beers, and the others are "guest beers", and they were all busily poured.