Disclaimer: This restaurant review is a reposting of one I previously posted on another site in early January. This is my personal experience with my family. You are free to agree or disagree.
From Two Roads in Stratford to Long Trail in Vermont,
they’ve got everything for the thirsty beer connoisseur. Add to that a funky
space, open bar area, and flat screen TVs for catching the game, and you can
say hello to you new favorite place.
But that’s the upside. Here’s the downside: the food. I’d
love to tell you that the meal my family and I had there tasted great and was
well presented. I’d like to tell you that, true to their name “Local,”
everything was fresh and crisp using only the finest ingredients.
Unfortunately, I can’t. Their offerings look good on paper. But on
your plate, a plastic picnic one at that, they are merely a romp through
mediocrity at best.
We ordered the pulled pork sliders and the beer braised
mussels to start. We followed up with a tuna taco, seared salmon, and roasted
bricked chicken.
The pulled pork was fine, although that’s kind of hard to
screw up. As long as you don’t burn the meat, using bottled barbecue sauce to
douse it with, you’re good to go. But the rolls shouldn’t look and taste like
Parker House. And, the accompanying slaw was over-mayonnaised tasting less
freshly made and more like it came out of a can. The whole dish gave the impression
of dinner on a shoestring budget.
Beyond that, it was clear that the slaw on the pork sliders
was also used on the tuna taco. For the taco, the tuna had an appropriate sear
on the outside with a good color on the inside. But I shouldn’t taste a creamy
goop on my tuna. It’s not a tuna sandwich, so skip the mayonnaise please. It
should be crisp and bright with lime and cilantro and a matchstick medley of
fresh veg. What I got was the exact same glop they put on the pork and the glop
wasn’t that good to begin with.
The braised mussels were cooked, but that’s as far as my
compliment goes. Very few of them weren’t steamed open from the cooking
process, which you have to expect with shellfish. But the sauce tasted almost a
little stale. I’ve had mussels steamed in beer many times before, so I had a
certain expectation. I’m not sure if the beer was off or if everything they put
in the beer just didn’t work. The veggies were way overcooked to the point of
mush. Whatever herbs were in there didn’t marry well with the beer choice.
It should be a good quality light ale or rich lager to steam
the shells open, the vapors steeping the meat inside. There should also be a
hint of lemon that marries as much with the shellfish as it does with the beer.
The mirepoix of carrots, onions, and celery should still be toothsome—cooked,
but with enough give to let the patron know they’re fresh.
The bricked chicken, while over salted, was moist. The
crispy potatoes were good, but the veg of the day was also over salted making a
decent dish not so decent. The seared salmon, however, was far from moist. It
was the kind of dense dryness just shy of a sandbox.
I’m not sure, but I think the veg used for the salmon was also
used with the chicken. Frankly, it was hard to tell what was in any dish. The
place was very dark, especially upstairs. And, that’s where they put us because
we had kids. Even though we came in on a Sunday night with barely any of the
booths occupied downstairs, I felt like we were pushed upstairs and out of the
way. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t really bother me. Except, it’s a beer bar with
flat screen TVs to watch the game. But you can’t see the game from upstairs. No
TVs. You actually have to crane your neck around the bannister to catch a
glimpse of anything. What, people with kids don’t like sports?
More to the point, my daughters are 13, 11, and 9. With
family abroad, each of them has traveled starting as young as six months old.
They have been to some high-end European restaurants and know how to conduct
themselves appropriately. To be pushed upstairs with the kids felt a little
insulting. And if you’re not going to entertain us as well, then injury just
got added to insult.
(One of my work friends relayed a similar result. She and
her husband took their 8-year-old daughter to watch a game on a recent Saturday
evening around 5:00 p.m. The place was relatively empty, so they asked to watch
the game from one of the booths downstairs. They were told no; they had to sit
upstairs. That essentially meant not watching the game they came to see. They
politely left.)
From a service standpoint, their stations are on the first
floor. So even if you ask for a glass of water, it takes several minutes to get
it because they don’t have what they need up top. That’s a planning and layout
issue that should have been caught before they opened in late December.
Fairfield is a family town. If families feel like they’re
not getting good food and good service (or worse, feel like they’re not really
welcome), they won’t come back. For
Local, that should be food for thought.
