Columbus Brewing Company – Good Bar Food

This is a review, it’s my opinion based on my experience and consists of what made my experiance.

It’s difficult on how to approach this review. I went there on a suggestion that it was a good place to have dinner. For that, it failed miserably. But if you look at it as a bar, the food isn’t that bad.

We arrived on a Saturday night and had about a 30 minute wait. (which isn’t bad for a Saturday night) The clientele seemed mostly families with a peppering of couples and a bachelorette party at the bar. We were seated in a nice booth opposite the kitchen that gave us the ability to see the whole area and even see into the kitchen.

I kind of like open kitchens. Having worked in a few places, I can tell you that the level of professionalism in an open kitchen is a lot higher. There is an element of being on stage and it encourages you to not only keep focused but really watch your sanitation and presentation.

The waitress arrived and told us about the place and the specials looking blankly at the wall behind us. She was bored, which I understand, waiting tables is tough work. But her bored presentation of the specials kept us away from ordering them. Throughout the night there was very little eye contact. Something I found rather off putting as I like to make eye contact when talking with people.

We order an appetizer and two entrees. The spinach avocado dip, a pizza and the Jambalaya. The pizza and the Jambalaya arrived first. The pizza was pretty bland and pale without crispness. (A sign that the pizza oven was set too low). The Jambalaya was mushy and the rice soggy. It looked an tasted like it had been around for a couple of days, It certainly didn’t look like the picture on the website About 2/3rds of the way through our appetizer arrived. The dip had a skin on the top, which was a little puzzling. Until I looked in the kitchen and saw the cook sliding the ramekin full of dip into the salamander to warm it up before placing it on the plate.)

It wasn’t fresh, and definitely not made there. It had little, if any flavor and the taste of artificial cheese was pretty prevalent.

Before the dinner we got a flight of beers and sampled a lot of the beers. The waitress explained that the one not on the menu was brewed in house. I felt this was kind of weird that only a single beer was brewed there. Was she misinformed?

All in all, the food was pretty bad and the service sub par. The prices were reasonable, but I don’t patronize a place because of it being inexpensive. If price were the only issue, White Castle would reign supreme.

I left vowing never to come back for a diner. Later I thought they we had perhaps been misinformed. As a bar it was pretty good. They had a good variety of beers and reasonable bar food.

So it’s a mixed review.

As a restaurant it failed. Bad service, bad food, bad ingredients, warmed over food, bad execution.

As a bar it was pretty good. Clean, Bar service, large snack selection, good parking.

As for “Raising the bar on brew pubs”, it was below average and disappointing.

www.columbusbrewingco.com