Josh S.
Yelp
I've been a fan of Troegs beer for a long time. They make some good stuff, all the way from an easy sipper to a hold on to your pants...you're likely not going to remember last night (Mad Elf). I've also been here a few times as a normal guest and held business meetings in their upstairs tasting room.
It's a cool looking place with the brewery and restaurant combined. I've never eaten outside but I would imagine during the summer it gets packed. Please note, they are busy all of the time so be prepared for that. For the most part it's communal dining (there are a few four tops if you're lucky you can grab). There isn't table service, you order your drinks from the bar and your food from a walk up window.
The beer is good, and you can find it almost anywhere (at least on the East Coast). The food is good as well...nothing I would say is phenomenal but they're putting the effort in and it shows. On this recent visit we ordered a few apps to share and a hot dog for our five year old from the kids menu. The hot dog is what you'd expect, a hot dog on a roll in a basket with a bag of chips...nothing more (but nothing more was or really should be expected).
On to our food, my wife is always a fan of charcuterie so she of course grabbed that. It came with some sliced apples, honey, pickles, some crackers, a few slices of watermelon radish (for garnish), blue cheese, a Mad Elf rind cheese (which was great), a salami, their hot mustard, a marmalade, and what they said was cured Tasso ham. It look good and for the most part it was, my only critique is that everything was cold which is never good with charcuterie because you can't taste the full flavor. Now, maybe they don't sell many of these so they need to keep them under refrigeration, or they're simply on top of their food safety. Next time we'll order this at the end of the meal so the flavors fully wake up. But the cheese was great, the cured meats were good with the salami having a better (and more) flavor than the ham. The ham had a lot of fat that seemed to match the same amount of edible protein.
You can't visit a brewery without getting a soft pretzel and as expected in this area, the pretzel itself was perfectly cooked. It came with a side of beer cheese and their mustard cream (which is basically a spicy mustard and is great!). The misstep with these is what a lot of "breweries" attempt to do, to get some form of beer or beer ingredient into every dish. In this case it was to make the topping sprinkled on the pretzel (in a healthy amount) out of malted barely and some sea salt. The barley was flavorless and aside from a little texture did nothing nor did it really stick to the pretzel. What was missing was the salt, if I'm having a pretzel I'm definitely expecting a salty bite. It was good but could've been much better.
We had to give the Seared Country Duck Pate a chance, which was served with sweet potato & apple fritters, braised red cabbage, apple cider gastrique, maple aioli. I'm not sure if we were supposed to put every thing on the fritter and eat it, but all of the flavors worked well. The pate was amazing and rich, the cabbage cut through perfectly. This was a very good dish that I would make the trip here for. Definitely a must try!
Finally, the most lackluster dish, their Hop Fries, fries served with rosemary hop salt, malt vinegar aioli, spicy ketchup. The fries were fresh cut, hot and cooked well but there was literally zero seasoning on them. I'm not an aioli fan so can't comment on that but the spicy ketchup was good. But fries should have some salt...I'm not splurging my calories on these things often so when I do, they should come correct. I wouldn't order again but if you like unseasoned fries they are perfectly cooked.
Good service all around, even though there isn't any table service. Everyone is helpful and polite. It's a fun place to stop, check out the brewery on the self guided tour and the gift shop.
