Scott Y.
Yelp
Two night's ago, my wife and I tried Black Sheep Social Club for the first time. Overall, I thought it was a great experience, despite a few very minor missteps.
I genuinely struggle with whether the minor missteps are even worth mentioning. I usually try to have appropriate expectations for restaurants based on price points. So, the same issue that's not even worth mentioning at a restaurant like Cheddar's (which sells a meatloaf for $13.50) might be something that really bother's me at a restaurant like Joseph's Steakhouse (which sells a ribeye for $65.00). Black Sheep sells a meatloaf for $17.00, and a porterhouse for $55.00, which makes it hard to slot them into a certain price point.
While our food was excellent, I might actually say that my favorite thing about The Black Sheep Social Club was the decor. I don't usually care about decor at all, but The Black Sheep was absolutely beautiful. I would definitely recommend them as a date venue, when the atmosphere is especially important.
As I've mentioned, the food was excellent. I ordered the penne a la vodka, and a side of the vegetable risotto. When I try a new restaurant, I generally try to find what I think are the two entrees I would like best, and I ask my server which of the two they would recommend. I find that eliminates the chance of ordering the worst thing on the menu. I don't remember the other option I was considering, but I remember that I totally expected our server to say he prefered that one. Whatever it was, it made more sense with a side of risotto than a pasta dish does, but I decided to stick with the side of risotto, and just have a very carb heavy meal. My wife ordered the risotto entree (which ended up being just a larger portion of the vegetable risotto side), and she also got a crunchberry cheesecake for dessert.
I think the star of everything we ordered was the risotto. Interestingly, I considered ordering the risotto entree until I saw that it had cauliflower in it. If I had to name the food I hate the most, it is without a doubt cauliflower. So, even though I absolutely love risotto, I opted not to get the orzo and cauliflower risotto entree in favor of the vegetable risotto side. When our food came and I saw that my side was definitely orzo risotto, I looked a little closer to confirm that the "vegetable" in "vegetable risotto" was indeed cauliflower. I actually ended up eating about half of my risotto side, and found it quite enjoyable despite how much I hate cauliflower. That's pretty impressive. My wife enjoyed hers so much that she actually requested two sides of it to go. My penne a la vodka was also very good. The pasta was cooked correctly, the meal was sauced appropriately, and the chicken which I had as an add-on was cooked perfectly. I also enjoyed the couple bites I had of my wife's Cap'n Crunch cheesecake. All around, the food was excellent!
So, that just leaves the few minor missteps. The first was that our waiter took my wife's drink to refill it, and never brought it back. She had asked for a Cherry Coke, and the waiter offered to mix grenadine and Coke to make one. So, when he took the glass to refill it, he probably brought it to the bar to have the bartender add the grenadine, and maybe got sidetracked. The second misstep was the crust on the cheesecake. It was without a doubt the hardest dessert crust I have ever encountered. I think the suhar in the Cap'n Crunch melted into the ground up cereal, and then hardened into something harder than the restaurant probably envisioned. I'm not saying the crust was unbreakable, but it was the type of thing where you had to press down hard enough that your utensil would make a loud noise on the plate in the rare instances you were able to break through. The last misstep was the table not being wiped down. We were a party of two, but were seated at a table for four. That's generally a nice convenience. We had space to put our phones, to spread out, etc. It probably wouldn't have mattered as much, but my wife had literally just opened a package with a new seude or microfiber phone case and put it on her phone before we got in the car to go to dinner. When she picked up her phone from the table, the phone case had something sticky covering almost the entire side that was touching the table, and the bag with the to go risotto was also sticky. Since the restaurant had hostesses as well as servers, I would generally expect that the hostess who seats you, and the server who takes your order, would both be checking to make sure the table had been wiped down. Again, these aren't the types of issues that would even be memorable at a place like Cheddar's or Perkins. They're also the type of thing that wouldn't be accaptable at Joseph's or Orchard Green. I don't know how big / small of an issue they should be at Black Sheep. So, I'm just mentioning them as a side note.
Overall, I would definitely recommend Black Sheep, and I will almost certainly return.
