Operation finish the Medina County Brew Path: still in effect.

We were just here a few weeks ago after Ted’s pick of a – shocking – Mexican restaurant whose name I won’t even begin to try to write here again – but only for drinks to get a brew path stamp at the end of the night and not food.

So it’s fair game. And we can get another stamp. Win!

And it’s another patio night! Cheers to summer. Thank you for playing along and giving us another nice Wednesday evening Mother Nature.

Unfortunately that’s about there the winning ends on this visit. Whomp whomp.

We really should’ve known we were in for a journey when it took more than a hot minute to get the server over even for our initial drink orders. They also didn’t give us drink menus when we sat down, but fortunately the draft list is updated online so we could at least be ready when our server finally did appear.

Shane joked that at this rate we would be lucky to make it over to Ignite Brewery to claim that stamp before closing.

These words were spoken at like 7pm. Spoiler alert: he wasn’t joking. We made it, but barely.

For beers, it was a white rajah (IPA) for Ted, a strawberry crunch ale for me and a blueberry lemonade shandy on nitro for Shane.

We also put in apps with the first round of drinks, since we had learned in just this short portion of our visit thus far to be efficient because who knows when we might see the server again.

Those apps included fried green beans for Ted.

And jalapeño cornbread for me and Shane. Which I somehow missed getting a photo of it seems, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that we did in fact order it.

For meals – which for the record we had to make a concerted effort to stop the server as he dropped off the apps in order to actually put in – I got the farmhouse chicken sandwich, which is a breaded chicken breast between two buttermilk biscuits.

I was looking at the caprese chicken sandwich, but decided on the less healthy option. There no need to be healthy when biscuits are in the mix. Everyone knows this.

Shane got the Pitmaster, which is a fancy way of saying a whole bunch of meat on a plate. It’s like imagine a sampler platter that you usually get as an app at a restaurant, except it’s just all meat. With some fries and Cole slaw. And a weird slice of white bread, because OK.

Ted got the Expedition burger. Shane tried to tempt him into ordering the locals plate dinner – a combo of pierogis and brats and a whole bunch of other things – because he thought that had Ted’s name written all over it. But he wasn’t swayed. Well, I mean, he thought about it. But stuck with his burger.

He ordered his burger medium and it came out – as you can probably see in the photo – closer to very well done. He later said that could’ve been because since the burger wasn’t traditional beef (it’s elk or another game) and the cook maybe didn’t realize you don’t have to cook it as long.

Props to Ted for giving them the benefit of the doubt and trying to make this visit better than it was. Noble effort. Truly.

In comparison, Shane had very few good things to say about, well, any part of this visit. To put it nicely, he was not a fan.

Proof: he actually gave one of his two wings on the plate to Ted because he was so unhappy with the other one he tried. And we all know Shane doesn’t usually share food.

He called it his second most disappointing meal of the past few months, right behind Laconis.

Ouch.

My sandwich was just OK. I was looking forward to the combo of the hot honey and cinnamon butter, but they put it all on the side instead of actually on the chicken so when you mix it yourself you don’t get the same combination I was envisioning. And the biscuit was a little too flaky to be the bookends of a sandwich. So basically I ended up taking it apart and eating all the pieces separate.

So yeah, disappointing meal for sure. But truthfully the service here was the biggest issue of the night.

Apparently we were seated in the zone of invisibility, because our server only checked on us once the whole time we were seated. A different person got us a second round, but that was the only other time we even interacted with any staff at all during our meal.

Usually we have the issue of servers dropping our checks off prematurely when we want to order another round and hang out for a bit, but here we had the exact opposite problem. We were actively trying to leave – hello, we were on a stamp mission – but the amount of time it took us to flag someone down and actually get our bills rivaled the amount of time it took the kitchen to prepare our meals.

I don’t think any of us has actually ever been that excited to watch someone walk away with our credit cards.

But that excitement was short lived, because those cards apparently went on a little adventure after we handed them over. Or, change that, they actually sat at the cashier station, but our server went about his business of providing meals and doggy bags to other tables and ignored the fact that we just. wanted. to. leave. Like all he had to do was bring the checks back and drop them off, so we could grab our cards from the little folder and sign our names and go on with our lives. Literally the easiest task.

To quote Shane: this is what it feels like to be held hostage.

If it has been super busy we might’ve had more sympathy. But, well, it wasn’t. This staff was just very bad with time and project management. Yes there were a couple of big parties on the patio, but then place another server to help in the section. It’s summer. People want to sit outside.

We finally had to flag someone – not our server – down to ask them to please find our server and ask him to bring our cards back so we could leave. To his credit he did profusely apologize. But it’s hard when we can see the ways in which he could’ve been more efficient and he just wasn’t.

Disappointing service + disappointing meals = next year we’ll remember to just save this stop for stamps only and not count on meals. Lesson learned.

Picked by: Steph