Sometimes even when you’re told what to expect it’s still a surprise when it slaps you in the face.
We’ll just leave this here and caption it “foreshadowing.”
And also only 50% correct.
The funny part is that – to quote the cult 90s movie Clerks – we weren’t even supposed to be here tonight. I was originally going to pick one of three places over in the Middleburg Hts/Strongsville area, because we are clearly running out of new places around here. But they were all between 35-40 minutes away, and after a tedious and sluggish commute home through several different downpours I had run out of curse word compilations necessary to spend that amount of time in the car again in the same evening.
So then I pivoted to the Blind Squirrel in Kent, because we hadn’t been there in a hot minute. Actually as we were waiting in Ted’s driveway to pick him up we checked this handy website and discovered the last time we were there was 8/13/25. So 364 days. Eerie.
But then we arrived to find a very full parking lot. Overfull actually. We sent Ted inside to investigate and it turns out between trivia night and the weekly Queen of Hearts drawing being up to some obscene amount like $17K there were no open seats at all.
And that’s how we ended up at the Clubhouse.
To be fair we were almost willing to call this one a new pick instead of a revisit because we have never actually sat inside the restaurant, only on the patio. And tonight was definitely an inside night, given my previous statement about nearly having to use a boat to get home.
The parking lot looked busier than we had ever seen it when we pulled up so we had a brief moment where we thought the universe might just be telling us to give up and go home because by that point we were out of ideas for option #4. But lucky us, we were able to score a table all the way across the space from the door. Granted it was in the dark next to a dripping air vent pipe so ambiance be damned, but it was a table nonetheless.
Looking back maybe the universe really WAS trying to tell us to just give up and go home, and we were just ignoring the messages. Our bad.
But when you throw in a Wednesday night burger special you can see how we thought things were going in the right direction, no? The deal is $12 for a burger with your choice of cheese and toppings with fries.
Guess what we all ordered?
The only difference in our orders was the type of cheese (or lack thereof in Ted’s case) and the way we had them cooked. Medium well for Ted, medium for me and medium rare for Shane.
We also got an order of fried green beans. And canned and bottled drinks all around as they have nothing on draft.
And here’s where the wheels really fall off our adventure.
Let’s take this whole “your choice of cheese” business. I chose mozzarella from a list of options that were not printed on the menu but instead read aloud to us by the bartender in a manner akin to someone looking in the fridge and discovering something new at every glance. So when it arrived and was announced as “burger with taco cheese” I was surprised not only because that wasn’t my order but also because I don’t even know if that option had been on the list in the first place. OK.
But they’re going to fix it … by scraping the melted taco cheese off the patty and replacing it with a mountain of shredded mozzarella cheese. Yeah, um, see that’s not helpful when the burger is no longer hot. Basically every time I took a bite it spewed shredded cheese on the table because it wasn’t melted at all and nothing was holding it on the sandwich.
So that’s fun.
Meanwhile Ted had no cheese on his burger – by his choice – but in another form of “nothing holding things onto the sandwich” he lost his tomato when the overzealous server came to deliver knives to the table, speared his burger with the knife and shot a tomato out the side of the sandwich. Because just setting the silverware on the table is clearly overrated.
Supposedly she was bringing another slice over but as I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that dream died along with our impression of this place.
Shane received the only burger at the table that arrived as ordered, but was disappointed in both the temperature and flavor of his burger. It wasn’t at all how he had remembered it from out past visits.
And we know we’ve seen this same bartender on our previous visits and left without complaint. But this time, either due to where we sat, or because she had friends sitting on the other side of the room – who knows, but we definitely went long stretches without her ever once looking over in our direction. We would’ve even settled for a yell of “you good?” But no. Cloak of invisibility, enacted.
And then she committed the cardinal sin of WTGW: telling us she would bring us our checks over after we finished eating without asking if we planned to have any more drinks or hang out for a bit.
So yeah, the sign from the start of this post and the matching slogan on the back of her shirt proclaiming “cold beer, shitty service” got at least the latter correct. If you’re going to overachieve at something that may not be what I would personally pick, but you do you.
But it worked out in our favor, because our early departure from the Clubhouse allowed us an opportunity to stop in at for a drink at Stowaway Pub, which none of us had been certain was still open until we pulled on the door this evening. But it’s now confirmed they are open and do still have food, so chances are you’ll see this one as a revisit pick in the near future.
Picked by: Steph (begrudgingly)
