It’s been a long time since I have sat down and wrote a post, and for that I apologize. Life goes on, walking the dog, going for dinner, not much new. (I did get poisoned at work, and I’m recovering slowly but still feel very out of sorts, and I’m not able to think for long periods of time.)
Saturday night we felt like trying someplace new for dinner. It was around 8 pm and we went by the 120 Bar and Grill on 120th street. The establishment is large, with two generous rooms. As you enter, to the right is “The Grill” which was empty, so we went left into the bar. There was no one serving as a hostess, so we kinda looked around a bit. We got a few strange stares so we sat ourselves in a booth.
A waitress with a LOT of makeup asked us for an order, and I requested Sleeman Honey Brown. They don’t have it, but have Rickard’s Honey, so I take that. It comes flat. I order the “pork special” but she doesn’t know what that is, and I say, “on the board, the pork special.” “Oh, the pork wellington,” she says. Uh…. ok….
The bar is quite dirty. It really needs a good scrub. It feels like it has not been properly cleaned since they banned smoking, which was what? 3 years ago? 4? The tables are still horribly scarred with burn marks from cigarettes.
We were watching the football game, but the bartender turned all the televisions to the Cartoon network. When we queried him on it, he said they wanted to turn the bar into a club at night, so putting on kiddie shows seems to be the way to attract their desired clientele.
Wonderful. We’re looking for a nice adult evening out, and we get cartoons blasting at us from 15 televisions, all tuned to the same program. Needless to say, five minutes after the switch, the bar, which had 10 tables, emptied. There were three tables left. Yes, the joint emptied.
Dinner arrived. What a joke that was. The “pork Wellington” was a piled high mess of stuff, that came in a bowl. When dinner arrives in a bowl it’s never a good thing, unless you’ve ordered soup of course. There was something on the bottom of the plate, then a pile of mashed potatotes, then some pile of something, then something piled on top that, that made it look a little like a Mickey Mouse doll head. The two “ears” were “roasted peppers”, which fell off the pile when the waitress set it down. She was embarrassed and apologized, but really the chef should apologize for that stupid stack of food.
The pork was NOT wellington (Wellington means it’s wrapped in pastry – there was no pastry in this dish). It was a piece of POORLY cooked meat, that was SOOOoooooo rare, it was bleeding on the mashed potatoes. When I called the waitress over and told her the pork was not cooked, she asked how I’d like it cooked! I said, well how about cooking it so I don’t die when you serve it??
The 120 Bar and Grill is a total embarassment. The staff obviously need better training. The chef is a moron, who should be charged with reckless endangerment. The management well, what can you say about management that puts cartoons on TV on a Saturday night, when people are there to watch football!!? When three quarters of your tables get up and leave, you think they’d catch on. Of the three tables that did not leave, one was us waiting for dinner, the other was eating their dinner (they left as soon as they finished), and the other was a group of Sikhs getting drunk.
Check out the 120 Bar and Grill – walk in, look around, leave – Just don’t order the beer or the food!
