Westside Tavern – I Can Has A CheezBurger?
I really wanted to like this place. The name will remind us of a neighborhood bar/restaurant, in using the word “tavern”. And once you walk in, the place looks airy and yet broodingly hip. The stylized wood accents are all around, with a bar that stretches the length of the main dining room. Tonight we were celebrating a friend’s birthday in one of their two private rooms.
The bar is one of my favorite features of the restaurant. It hosts loads of diners and drinkers with ample room in the behind for bartenders. If I were a bartender, this would be the ideal bar to work at. They also had a great selection of tequilas and other top shelf liquors.
With such a large group tonight, the planner decided upon a set menu. We had choice of either soup or salad for the appetizer with their flat bread pizza. Their flat bread pizza was probably my favorite dish of the night. It was, literally, a pizza with roasted tomatoes, basil, a gooey cheese. The soup that I had, a corn chowder, was thick and had bits of corn in each bite. Unfortunately, after that, it went downhill.
Included in its choices for entrees, for tonight, we could either have the cheeseburger, risotto, pot roast, or chicken. I naturally choose the cheeseburger, based on my burger & mac’n cheese rule. I was told, by a close friend, that their cheeseburger was the best that they had ever had, even better than Father’s Office. Once I bit into the burger I almost immediately knew that this was not the burger experience I was looking forward to. Perhaps it was the wait, for all 24 other entrees to be served at once. The burger was not flavorful. The cheese was unappealing. The bun was large and soggy, from sitting there under heat lamps soaking the juices. I was unimpressed and sad for my poor burger experience.
I hoped that my dessert, the bread pudding, would make up for my bad choice for the entree. But I was wrong. Though it looked great and sounded great, the dessert was way too sweet. I wasn’t expecting all that chocolate to be blended in the dessert. It was just way too sweet for my taste. I had a bite of the toffee cake, which was quite good. I thought it looked like a chocolate cake. It wasn’t that sweet which fit my taste quite well.
Aside from the bread pudding and the cheeseburger, I liked Westside Tavern. Good location, at the Westside Pavilion, with either free self parking or valet parking in the back.
