Driving Inertia- A Texas Break
- Well, at least the Crawfish were good.
- When It All Goes Wrong
- It’s a Shotgun Marriage in New Orleans
- Avoiding Death and STDs on Bourbon Street
- The Best Beer in New Orleans
- Doing the Tourist Thing: Cafe du Monde in New Orleans
- The Battle of the Po’ Boy
- A Quick Tour of New Orleans
- Lisa’s Been to All 50 States!
Brocach Irish Pub | Milwaukee, WI
I don’t even know where to start, so I ask Lisa, “Where do I even start?” She says, “Well, the service sucked.” So I’ll start there…
The service sucks. We arrive and the place is empty. It’s zero out and we’ve been walking. We’re frozen and ready for a drink. We ask for a table. “We’re full,” says the hostess. She doesn’t say, “We’ve got a lot of reservations tonight,” or “Sorry, we’re expecting a crowd.” She says, “We’re full.” The place is fucking empty.
So we sit at the bar. We get menus, Lisa sees they have warm drinks, so she orders a hot toddy. I get a Sprecher. Bartender has no idea how to make Lisa’s drink so he looks it up. He struggles through, it tastes alright, and he plops down my beer in front of me — 16 ounce bottle; no glass.
We order food. I get soup (remember: we’re frozen) and the fish and chips. Lisa gets soup and a salad. Bartender takes our order, leaves our menus. I move them over to the side.
Bartender is really humming now. The guy on the earlier shift is wrapping up and our bartender is showing him the ropes. This is how you enter an order, this is how you make a hot toddy, this is how you serve beer in a bottle — that sort of shit. “You need anything else?” earlier shift guy asks. “Nope,” Bartender replies. Earlier shift guy takes off from behind the bar, grabs a stool two-down from ours, and orders a drink. He’s had a rough day. Bartender makes him a drink, strikes up a conversation, ignores the rest of the customers, and decides he’s doing such a bang-up job, he deserves a drink. So he pours himself a glass of whiskey.
Our food starts to come out. I get my fish and chips; Lisa gets her soup. The Irish Onion Soup is basically just a bowl of melted cheese. My fish is great, but some of my fries are raw. My soup comes minutes later along with Lisa’s salad. Bartender mumbles an apology, “Sorry it came out all at once.” The idiot put the order in wrong.
Salad is under-seasoned, but my soup is ok. We eat what we can and leave. Fuck this place. All the tables are still empty except one. And Brocach is OnMilwaukee.com’s best new restaurant of 2008.