Rock & Brews Restaurant

This was another “bending of the rules” Shake and Date adventure in that not only did we not shake this place out…it’s not even in our bottle. This place came about because we had tickets to a concert Tuesday night before heading out of town until the following Monday. The concert was at The Backyard (Cal Expo), and to park at the venue was $20, unless you had dinner reservations for the Rock & Brews Restaurant. The financial advisor in my head said, “If you’re going to pay $20, you may as well get some drinks and a snack for that”. So I made a reservation for 5:00pm. Being as their Happy Hour ends at 5:00pm, we did not get to partake in that; So now you may be asking why I am writing about this place if it wasn’t in the bottle and we didn’t go during Happy Hour. Well, as I mentioned, we were heading out on a road trip for the rest of the week, so if we didn’t talk about this place, there would be no Shake and Date for the week at all. Plus, we might help someone out who may have been thinking about driving out to Sacramento to try this place.

If you like rock music as we do, both the décor of this place and the music are great. The TV’s situated around the place are playing the music video to accompany whatever song is playing. There are rock posters and tapestries adorning the walls and the ceiling, which took me straight back to my bedroom during my high school years. But that’s pretty much where the enjoyment stopped (other than my company of course).

If memory serves me right (I didn’t have my composition book with me), the beer we both got was a light lager. Now normally if it’s a beer I’m unfamiliar with, I’ll ask for a taste first before diving in full pint. However, it took entirely too long for a waitress to ask us if we’d like a drink in the first place, so there definitely wasn’t time to wait for a taste. Mistake number one. The beer was so horrible it was hard to choke down. Not only did it taste bad, it was barely cold (which would also have contributed to the bad taste). It’s hard to say whether our beers came out of the tap at that temperature, or if they possibly sat at the bar for way too long before they finally got delivered to us. Either way, it wasn’t good. Since we missed Happy Hour, we decided to go with our old faithful, nachos, which were called “Street Nachos” according to the menu. Mistake number two. The toppings advertised for the nachos sounded fabulous, and maybe they may have been better had they not  been assembled by what looked like may possibly had been done by a 3 year old. One side of the plate of chips had no toppings, there were some toppings assembled in the middle, and then on the other side of the plate, the cheese and toppings had somehow missed the chips altogether and were just gathered around hanging out on the plate. The few chips that had some toppings on them were pretty tasty, but not tasty enough for the price.

Sorry to backtrack, but I need to mention that before we got there I placed a phone call to ask if we still park in Lot D of Cal Expo to get to the restaurant as the information in the email had stated (it seemed a little strange so I wanted to confirm). She validated that the email was correct and we were to go to Lot D. She also let us know that once we were done dining, if we already have tickets, we would get to exit the back of the restaurant straight into the venue. At this point we’re thinking, “cool!” Nope. She was wrong on both accounts. When we got to Lot D, we were told we needed to make a U-turn and go back, and when we finished eating our disheveled nachos and drinking our warm beer, we had to exit the restaurant to walk back around to stand in line for the show. Mistake number three. Listening to the person who answered the phone. Or wait…would that be mistake number one? Or maybe this was number two? Because mistake number one was making the reservation.

As I’ve already mentioned, the service was very slow, but I’m not sure if that had to do with there being a performance at The Backyard that night, or if it’s always like that. We waited for our check so long I was afraid we might miss the concert entirely.   Before starting this blog (as always) I went to the venues website to gather information for this blog. The pictures of their food on their website look AMAZING…but I guess that’s why you hire professional photographers and hold special photo shoots of food. To make it look amazing. While I was on the website I read some of the reviews left by previous patrons. There’s not that many on there, but I did notice there were some good ones. They seemed to be from at least a year or more ago though, so I’m wondering if it’s gone down-hill. Let me know if you’ve had a good experience and think we should try it again. They do have locations all over the place so they must be doing something right. Then again…there’s been many restaurants that used to be all over the place that are now no more. Perhaps we should try a different location?