For the last eight months or so Alan and I have been watching with hope the construction of a new restaurant right down the road from our house. It was apparent that it would be a neighborhood grill and we would love to have a casual place to grab a burger and drink nearby. For as much as we love our house, the town of Marlboro is seriously lacking when it comes to sit down restaurants. In fact, other than a damn good pizza place, we never eat here. We either go to Sea Bright, Red Bank or hike it out to The Pluckemin Inn.
After five days of dealing with the power and flooding issues Hurricane Irene brought our way, and seeing that Fireside Grille (yes, there's an "e" at the end for god-only-knows-why) had opened, we were ready to get a meal out of the house.
We went early - 6:00pm - on a Thursday and first observation...it was packed. There were people waiting outside and in the lobby. It's a big place with a bar area on one side of the reception lobby and a main dining room on the other. The decor is very much a sports bar - TVs everywhere, murals of sports legends and ball parks on the walls. Not really much connection to the word, "fireside", but who cares, right? Sports bar with good bar food would be good for us!
They tell us that there's a 30 minute wait for the main dining room or we're welcome to seat ourselves in the bar - first come, first served. We get a beeper but keep an eye on the packed bar scene. After ten minutes or so, a high table in the bar opens up and I grab it. I was quite hungry you see. By this time we've already realized that they are only running at about 70% capacity which we overhear is because the kitchen staff can't handle any more than that. Not a great sign - the place is only a week old.
It's freezing inside the restaurant so I order from our VERY bubbly waitress the french onion soup and a Cobb salad. Alan asks her to recommend an amber ale off the large beer list....but she has no idea what amber ale means. After a confusing exchange, he picks one to try in addition to ordering a basic bacon cheeseburger and fries.
My soup comes first, served in a traditional crock pot. It's hot, which is nice, but rather watery with much less cheese than I've come to expect from french onion soup. It's flavor is okay and it's hot but that's the best I can say about it. A little while later, Alan sees a rather clueless food runner with a tray that's obviously our order go to the other end of the bar and try serving the burger & salad to another table. It takes a moment for them to realize and inform the runner it's not what they ordered. They may or may not have contemplating keeping those dishes for a second or two before deciding to wait and see what would be behind door #2. The food makes its way back around the bar while we watch our waitress catch on and flag down the runner and the tray of food. Finally, it's on our table. My Cobb salad was ok. It wasn't great, it wasn't bad...it was forgettable. Alan's burger on the other hand was bad or at best, not good. Plain, lacking the mayo he ordered, not cooked to the medium state he asked for. Just blah.
So in summary - bland food, clueless wait staff and not operating at capacity despite huge crowds waiting to get in a try the first new restaurant to hit Marlboro in years. We might try it again in a few months to see if they ironed out any of their opening issues but this isn't one to write home about.
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