Survival...barely...

Had a blast at UDayton Arena today. Two very close games...

Much happier when it was OSU in trouble. I've nothing invested in them.

Terrified for most of the IU-Temple game, but IU survived...thankfully.

Goin' Frazey

The Girl noticed on the Fraze Pavilion schedule mailed to our manse that there's a certain famous person coming to Dayton on August 6. Looks like we'll be getting tickets...

Lonnieburger baskets: Tank's Bar & Grill (Dayton)

It's March so that means basketball. Next Thursday, for example, I have tickets to see the national DII men's semifinals at Bank of Kentucky arena over in Northern Kentucky. Hopefully Bellarmine will keep rolling along to at least then - and maybe to a second straight championship?

But I digress...

Calen and I trekked to the University of Dayton where we sadly saw the Vikes lose to the Middies - whose coach broke out Principal's heart last year, but that's neither here nor there. What is here and there is Tank's Bar & Grill (they provided the outside pic - no snow on the day we visited) in Dayton, a little down the road from the University of Dayton, a place that comes semi-recommended by RuffRyder (who used to and maybe still does frequent these parts). Calen texted and asked for a burger recommendation near his old campus, and he sent us to Tank's. Turns out, however, that he's never been there himself. He'd just heard that it was good.

So, let's put that quasi-recommendation to the test and see if anybody salutes.

Burger

• Apologies for the photo quality that you're going to see a little later. I could blame Calen's camera, but mine's no better, honestly. This first pic, though, is spot on clear and you get about as good a pic of the burger as you're going to see.
  
  The burger is freshly made with loose form and slightly sloppy shaping. The beef seems to be of decent quality with a nicely moist feel and enough fat to leave my fingers shiny as I ate the burger. That's all good. The problem, however, comes with the purity of that beefiness. There seemed to be absolutely no spice in the burger at all - no salt, no pepper, no nothing. Calen and I both salted - and I peppered - our burgers and found them vastly improved. I'm not a salt freaky by any stretch of the imagination, but I do want some flavor other than the pure beef. Pure beef is bland, man, no matter how good it is.
  
  The burger wasn't crusty and was pushed a little beyond the medium that I had ordered - no pink anywhere to be found on mine or on Calen's (also ordered medium). So, what's that make? In almost rightly cooked, utterly unspiced, fresh beef burger. What's that worth? Burger - 6 

Fries

• The fries in the top of the photo are in focus. Shut up...
  
  You can also see that they're also a little shiny (I don't want to say greasy, but they kind of were). They also weren't crispy in the least or very spiced. Clearly, Tank (Calen's pretty sure that Tank, himself, was at a table a couple away from us and might be eating a few too many of his own burgers...every day) isn't a man to overly (or remotely correctly) spice things. C'mon, man. They are, however, freshly cut. If you've had fries at Penn Station, you've had the fries at Tank's give or take. Fries - 5

 
Toppings

• The bacon was bacony but not noteworthy.The onion was sharp and bitey, fresh. The cheese was melted and slightly translucent. The lettuce had cell walls and chloroplast and everything. Trust me; I saw them with my own bare eyes. The toppings were successfully placed on top of the burger. Nothing was wrong with them, but nothing was particularly right about them, either. Toppings - 5 

Ambiance

•  I was surprised that Tank's turned out to be a disco on the inside...particularly because the outside doesn't seem all that disco-ey.

Wait, no, that was just my shaky camera skills. The flash was supposed to be off, but it turns out it wasn't. When the flash hit, I moved the stupid thing out of everybody's face so I wouldn't be that jerk-face who flashed his camera flash all over that place.

Ambiance

• Tank's is a solid, neighborhood place. They've got a bar and a couple of rooms in which to dine. They've got nice, hanging plants over the bar. They've got restrooms that are sort of heated. They've got a bunch of televisions around - no flat screens here, though. Things are a little dated, but they're comfy and friendly. Ambiance - 6

Cost

• $7.99 for the burger - cheese and bacon included...diet coke was a couple more bucks. That's right in the middle of the range. Cost - 5 

Other Stufffff

• Seriously, the plants are a nice touch. Fresh oxygen in the room is always appreciated. +`1 
• Um, there's not much else to be said about Tank's. It's not a bad place, but it's the kind of place that exists pretty much in every town. 

The math isn't looking too good for Tank's. Where do they fall?

Tank's Bar & Grill got 28 points.

• Terry's Turf Club - 45
• Cafe de Wheels - 44
• Senate - 43 
• City View Tavern - 40 (scaled from 32/40)
• Stuffed on Vine - 38
• Five Guys Burgers and Fries - 36 
• Roxy's - 36
• VanZandt - 34
• Gabby's - 34 
• Oakley Pub & Grill - 34 
• Quatman's - 32 / 34.5
• Troy's - 32 
• By Golly's - 32
• Wildflower Cafe - 31.25 (scaled from 26/40) 
• Sidetracks - 31
• Virgil's Cafe - 28 
• Tank's Bar & Grill - 28
• The Pub at Rookwood Mews - 28
• Smashburger - 28
• Habits Cafe - 28
• Graffiti Burger - 27
• Arthur's - 26
• Sammy's - 25 
• Gordo's - 20

Maybe we should try Doubleday's.

Tell a potassium joke?

I spent a week at the University of Dayton helping run a material science camp. We got to hang out in Science Center's Wohlleben Hall and saw the following cool things.

First, there was Chudd Auditorium which has maybe the coolest lecture hall periodic table I've ever seen and which I got to control since there was nobody in there all week long...

Then we got lucky enough that somebody in the chemistry department posted these chemistry jokes in one of their display cases...

I saved the best for last. Schroedinger's Cat walks into a bar...and doesn't.

That's hilarious.

Rockin' the phone lines

This afternoon is the rally downtown - with The National and The Breeders.

This morning it's time to hit the phone lines and order my tickets for the Beasties in Dayton...if The Girl can get her principal to okay her ducking out of conferences an hour early that night, anyway.

She'd gut me like a fish if I went to the Beasties without her.

More upcoming concerts that intrigue

And, thankfully, some of them are on weekend nights, so I'm in the clear...

• Old Crow Medicine Show - Fri, Oct 24 - Madison Theater, which I totally hate because it's a smoking venue
• Yonder Mountain String Band - Tues, Oct 14 - Madison Theater
• Black Keys - Fri, Oct 10 - Madison Theater
• Tannahill Weavers - Sat, Jan 24 - Canal Street Tavern, Dayton

Now, if I could just get the Beastie Boys, Chris Isaak, Richard Thompson, Wilco, Jeff Tweedy (solo), U2, Sufjan Stevens, James McMurtry, and a few others to come to town...

Our Year of Living Steakishly: September, The Oakwood Club

The Oakwood Club isn't actually on the Cincinnati Magazine list, but The Girl was set on trying it as a balance to last month's The Pine Club. She had heard that The Oakwood Club was sort of a less expensive version of that other steak house.

And I remembered my camera this time, so we have some photographic evidence this month.

If you need a refresher of the ground rules of our challenge, head back to the first post in the series.

The Oakwood Club is in a really nice, clearly monied area of town, appropriately enough, Oakwood, so it won't be quite as convenient at UDayton for Joey< but that's a price you gotta pay when searching for the best steak house in the Dayton/Cincy uber-market. The area's a bit too posh for my taste with the steakhouse being surrounded by upscale clothiers for a block or so each way. But if you go a couple of blocks south, you do at least get to visit Dorothy Lane Market, which is kind of cool.

Initial view of the Oakwood Club, Saturday, ~6:30pm
As was the case at the Pine Club, the first impression upon opening the second door into the Oakwood Club was one of darkness with the room underlit and each table having an individual light fixture. The darkness of the Oakwood Club wasn't quite as total as that of the Pine Club, however, and our eyes got used to the conditions rather quickly.

The Oakwood Club takes weekend reservations for parties of five or more only, so we ventured Oakwood-way aiming for a 6:30 seating and finding ourselves waiting at the bar for probably half an hour - they expected a forty-five minute wait. The Girl and I were both happy with the bar selections and value, I having a healthy-sized glass of Pinot Noir for $7 and she a manhattan that she described as solidly alcoholic for about $5, both very reasonable for an upscale establishment.

The bar area was fairly typically appointed with the stained glass seen at the top of this post and three televisions lining the walls, all turned to silent news and sports but with the subtitles rolling along. In a decently fancy place like the Oakwood Club, I would have expected no televisions, but the idiot box is pretty ubiquitous in any bar these days, so I guess I shouldn't be too disappointed.

We were seated as a booth in the bar area after closing out our bar tab - which they surprisingly wouldn't transfer to our table - and began to peruse the menu. Remembering the rules and trying to keep everything on a level playing field, we chose the following for our meals:

• Scallops wrapped in bacon with a red pepper sauce, appetizer
• The Girl
  Petite surf and turf
  - twin petite filets, rare after she described how she wanted it (pink/red in the center, crisp on the outside)
  - grilled salmon
  Rosemary garlic mashed potatoes
  House salad with peppercorn ranch dressing (on the side, as always)
• Chemguy
  Petite surf and turf (it was a good idea, what can I say?)
  - petite strip steak, also rare
  - blackened salmon
  Rosemary garlic mashed potatoes
  House salad with sweet and sour vinegrette

Bread selection, before
The appetizer came out fairly quickly, and the waitress took our entree orders while we waited for the scallops. She also brought us a bread basket with two options - herbed white bread with sesame and poppy seeds on top (very, very tasty) and a salt-topped brown bread (which The Girl enjoyed but which I found way too salty). The bread was much fresher than that of the Pine Club, so the Oakwood Club takes the early lead.

Bacon-wrapped scallops appetizer, before
The scallops were outstanding. They were nicely and very lightly breaded on top and bottom with the sides being flavorful, well-cooked bacon, a nice balance to the simple and slightly-sweet scallops. The red pepper sauce, seen in the center of the dish, was far too strong a flavor for the scallops but was tasty on the tomato halves presented as garnish. The lemon, however, was a nice splash on the scallops.

Bacon-wrapped scallops appetizer, after
The salads were next and came out in refrigerator-cold metal bowls, a nice touch to keep the salad fresh. Again, Oakwood beat out Pine as the Pine Club's salads were nothing but chopped iceberg lettuce with a couple of carrot shavings on top. The Oakwood Club offered much more interesting greens with red field greens, red cabbage, a cherry tomato half, and some carrot shavings mixed in. My dressing was a nice combination of tart, red wine vinegar and sugar, and The Girl's creamy dressing was well made. She did ask for the dressing on the side, however, which isn't how it arrived. Luckily the amount of dressing was reasonable though more than she would likely have used had she applied it herself.

Salads - mine on the left, before
Salads - mine on the left, after
We had a few moments before the entrees arrived as the Oakwood Club didn't seem quite so eager to move us along as did the Pine Club. At this point, we were approaching time for the anOSU-USC debacle, and I could see the pre-game over The Girl's shoulder, something that, again, I didn't care for when I'm out for a nice meal on the town.

ChemGuy's petite surf and turf, salmon on the left
The Girl's petite surf and turf, salmon on the right
Both surf and turfs came out on a plate with Bernaise sauce, a lemon quarter, and a simple garnish, and the mashed potatoes came out in their own dish. The full entrees come with two side dishes, but with most of the sides being a potato of some sort and the non-potato options being steamed broccoli/cauliflower or stewed tomatoes, we each went with the single side dish option of the smaller portions. The plates certainly weren't lacking in meet, however, as my steak was a seven- or eight-ounce portion, and The Girl's twin filets were in the range of six or seven ounces combined. Each salmon piece was another four or five ounces, making for a plate with in the range of eleven or thirteen ounces of meet combined for each of us.

The Girl's filets were very well cooked, much more evenly than her filet from the Pine Club, and she was quite satisfied with her choice. Her salmon was also very moist and nicely flavored. She reported being happier with her entree at the Oakwood Club than she had been at the Pine Club last month.

Mine, on the other hand, was a bit of a disappointment. My steak had a solid line of fat along the edge - something you'll see still on the plate in the after photo below, and my steak lacked the rich, deep, crunch crust that the Pine Club had achieved. My steak was nicely rare but seemed to have sacraficed the exterior texture that I enjoy so much to achieve the rareness that I found and appreciated in the center. My salmon - likely because of the blackening choice - was a bit drier than was The Girl's.

The potatoes, however, were excellent and a vast improvement on the sides from The Pine Club. The rosemary and garlic were very well balanced, and the very few scallion slices atop each dish were a nice contrast but didn't provide the sharpness of the white pieces that The Girl found distasteful in the Pine Club's version of the same dish. The potatoes were nicely whipped with nary a lump anywhere within them - something that I often find disappointing but that fit well with the creaminess that had been achieved.

ChemGuy's petite surf and turf, after
The Girl's petite surf and turf, after
The Girl took home one of her filets and the bread to make a lunch the next day - during the wind storm but before the power disappeared. The waitress wrapped up her leftovers and cleared things - including out Bernaise sauces that neither of us found at all necessary for the meals. I'll admit to not knowing exactly what a good or bad Bernaise would be like, so I'll omit commenting on that part of the meal other than to say that I could just as easily have asked not to have it brought out.

The two entrees ($22.95 each) and the appetizer ($8.95) tallied up to just shy of $60 once tax was added in, and we threw in $12 in tip. With the bar tab and tip, we got out of the place for $87 making this a cheaper meal than the Pine Club. That does come into the rankings, and let's turn there now...

• Appetizers - 8 - nicely cooked, good combination of flavors
• Steak - 6 - The Girl's words it didn't have that good crust, but it was well cooked - she gave hers an 8, I'll give mine a 4 because, honestly, it wasn't anything I couldn't get at a Sizzler
• Side dishes - 7 - the salmon counts here and the potatoes were very tasty (though The Girl found them to be a little salty and too smooth for her), the salads were good and had decent variety
• Atmosphere - 6 - The televisions in the bar area were a negative for me, and the place lacked the old school ring a ding ding that the Pine Club had, but it gets an uptick for the stained glass around the place
• Cost - 8 - I'm making up a scale here, so I'll define it thusly...
  10 - below $55 with tip
  9 - $55-65
  8 - $65-75
  7 - $75-85
  6 - $85-95
  5 - $95-105
  4 - $105-115
  3 - $115-125
  2 - $125-135
  1 - more than $135
  The meal itself was $72 - not including the bar tab, so that's an 8 on my scale.
• Service - 5 - nothing special here, probably would've gotten a six, but The Girl did ask for her dressing on the side
• Total score - 40 (out of 60)

As I said with the Pine Club, we have room for improvement, but The Girl summarized things correctly (ya have to check the stats to be certain, but they bear her conclusion out) when she said she was really happy with the money deal that the Oakwood Club offered. My steak at the Pine Club was worth the extra money because it actually made me pause with the first bite, and that's what I'm looking for in a steak house, but the totality of the Oakwood Club experience was a better one for the both of us.

If you like that nice crust on your steak, talk to the wait staff at the Oakwood Club and explain that to them. See if they can fix yours all right. If so, they'd've earned a couple more points from me.

The bar area, we sat in the third booth from the back of this photo (from the Oakwood Club's website) - my initial photo shows the other dining room to the right, behind the stained glass dividers

Our Year of Living Steakishly: August, The Pine Club

I'd previously mentioned the Cincinnati Magazine article listing the top twelve steak houses in the Cincinnati/Dayton area. The plan is to hit one on the list each month for the next year. Since we're both school-going folks (me a teacher, her a librarian at a new school this year), we thought we'd count our year as starting when we headed back to school and began the tour of steakishness this past Saturday.

Okay, first the ground rules...

• I order a strip steak. The Girl is more of a filet Girl.
• If there are certain side dishes that are recommended in the article or in online perusal, we'll try to order them and give feedback, but we're not going to dive into something that sounds disgusting just because some magazine reviewer liked it.
• If the steaks are huge, we split a strip.
• Appetizers are fair game and follow the same rules as side dishes.
• Dessert reports are unlikely as a solid steak dinner typically is a filling steak dinner.
• Steaks are all ordered medium rare because anything beyond that is overdone.
• Photos will be taken (probably without flash so as to not bother the other diners) before and after each course to show how much of each item was consumed as well as the general carnage and gluttony.
• All restaurants are rated on a one-to-ten scale in six categories.

And so we begin with The Pine Club in Dayton.

The Girl had heard a review of The Pine Club (heretofore referred to as TPC) on NPR's Splendid Table and was happy to see it opening the article and being titled as CAN'T REMEMBER. Partway through the meal, she asked me what I was expecting, and I gestured around the room simply saying "this" as the restaurant is exactly as advertised.


TPC is in a nice area of town, just on the edge of the University of Dayton housing and on a decently busy street only a couple of miles from the interstate even though their website directions took us through an older section of Kettering. I'd recommend following the Google directions and dropping off as though you were going to see a ballgame at UD Arena.

The reviews told us that no reservations were taken and that waits of two or three hours were not uncommon - something we wanted to avoid. So we showed up at about 4:50 on a Saturday afternoon/evening, after the doors open (at four) but before they actually start serving dinner (supposedly at five, but we saw folks eating when we got there). We were lucky enough to walk in and get the last free table because the place was packed.

We followed the hostess to our table, allowing our eyes to adjust to the dark, wood paneled interior surrounding a sixty-year-old bar. The Girl sat against the wall on a restaurant-long wall bench adorned with a simple diamond design of upholstery tacks at the top of the vinyl seats, so she got to watch the other customers, many of whom, I was surprised to see, weren't the blue hairs that I expected to see in a place that bills itself as a Supper Club.

We sat down to a smallish table, the two tiniest bread plates I've ever seen (probably three inches in diameter), and a basket of bread - excellently shown on the Road Food website. The table was clearly an old one as it rocked dramatically every time I rested my elbows (I know, I'm rude) on it, and the decor on the walls matched it as the frames held images of Olde English fox hunts, the prints of which probably predated my entry to the world.

Our waitress got to us almost immediately and took our drink order - The Girl with hot water as it was significantly chillier inside than out and me with a Diet Coke that came in an opened can with a smallish glass and ice. She got us our drinks quickly - something that will come to be notable with the service throughout the evening - and took our orders...

• Nantucket Cape Scallops, appetizer
• The Girl (I'm chivalrous enough to let her order first)
  Filet mignon, medium rare
  Asparagus - an extra charge
  Baked potato with sour cream
  House vinaigrette on the salad
• ChemGuy
  Strip-loin steak, medium rare
  Lyonnaise potatoes
  Stewed tomatoes (they were recommended in the article)
  House vinaigrette on the salad

We each ate a roll while we waited for the appetizer. The rolls clearly had been sitting out for a while before we got there but had a nice variety. There were good pumpernickel and caraway (very) salted rolls - almost pretzels but in a crescent shape. The basket also had a variety of crackers and a couple of more plain dinner rolls which we didn't try.

The scallops arrived in just a few minutes with two cups of tartar sauce and a couple of lemon slices. They weren't the large sea scallops that I'm more used to, but there were an even dozen mini-marshmallow-sized, very lightly breaded scallops in the dish between us with us each having our own plate and a cute little fork to eat them with. The scallops were very tasty, tender and simple, and the tartar sauce had a nice balance of relish and a bit of some simple herb.

As soon as we had finished the scallops, our plates were replaced with small melamine bowls with a very simple, dressed iceberg salad whose only variety was some shredded carrot and pepper freshly cracked at the table. The salad bowls were surprisingly well stocked, holding a healthy amount of lettuce for their apparent smallness.

After the salads were consumed, we had only a minute or two before our entrees arrived, each a bit fuller than expected as every steak apparently comes with a healthy pile of onion rings (thinner, really, more onion straws). No steak sauce, thankfully, was on the table or offered, a good sign for a well cooked steak.

The first bite of my (apparently-twelve-ounce) strip was excellent, balancing a nicely charred (actually they broil all their steaks) crust with a still-pink interior. The meat was tender but not livery, according to TPC press, dry-aged as all their steaks are. My steak was a very well cooked steak with little if any seasoning or adornment at all.

The Girl's eight-ounce filet (both steaks were obviously much larger than we should eat regularly but still reasonably sized for a $30 cut of meat) looked significantly smaller than my steak, though that probably had something to do with hers being half again as thick as mine. We traded tastes cut from each steak, and I can report that hers was a bit more tender (to be expected because of the difference in cuts) and very flavorful. She reported that he steak was, however, a bit unevenly cooked, having patches that were closer to medium and even bordered on medium well.

Her side dishes (asparagus with a Hollandaise sauce, baked potato) were both solid if unspectacular. The potato - medium sized - did come with a massive amount of sour cream - oddly and heavily dotted with chopped scallions including a bit oddly the white parts, enough to bury any patron's potato and those of at least three friends.

My sides were a very mixed batch. The stewed tomatoes were unappetising to view, looking like a pedestrian tomato soup with five very oily croutons floating, and they turned out to be even worse to taste. They were horrifically sweet and pretty much inedible. The Lyonnaise potatoes were better though still not very good, wrapping underdone hashbrowns around a pile of lightly sauteed, minced onions. The redemption of my side dishes came from the onion rings which were excellently well cooked - though a little light on any spice - and meshed very well with the steak.

Half of The Girl's potato, most of her onions, and most of my Lyonnaise went into a styrofoam box to be taken home and became breakfast the next morning (fried up with eggs and a bit of cheese).

The check came out with the box and tallied to $54. We did a quick bit of estimating math and realized that our waitress had made a bit of a mistake, undercharging us by about thirty dollars. We pointed this out to her - I'm honest enough, and she was nice - and got our corrected $83 bill which we paid with a check, rounding things up to an even $100 - right where I expect most of the meals to take us. TPC doesn't take credit cards, so make sure to bring your cash or personal check (which they happily accept).

So, where do we score The Pine Club?

• Appetizers - 7 - simple, plain, well done but unspectacular
• Steak - 7.5 - mine an 8, hers a 6 or 7
• Side dishes - 5 - mine were lower than that but hers were higher...we both wish we had gotten the mashed spuds with garlic, and the onion rings saved the rating
• Atmosphere - 6 - dark, wood, old, not elegant...I was a bit disappointed that the dress code was more casual than I had expected as there were people there in jeans (a couple) and shorts (maybe a quarter of the patrons)
• Cost - 5 - we need a definition here, 5 is earned if we get out for $100 (including tip), higher scores mean we got out more cheaply
• Service - 7 - good, quick service...not overly hovering...friendly enough...
• Total score - 37.5 (out of 60)

So we clearly have a lot of room for improvement, but that doesn't mean that TPC was bad. It wasn't.

It just wasn't spectacular, and I'm guessing that its reputation as one of the finest steak places in Dayton/Cincy is more based on longevity than on spectacularness.

Sadly, I forgot to take my camera so there aren't any pictures of our first meal of Our Year of Living Steakishly.

I'll make sure to correct that for the next review. Of course, we may just have to go back to The Pine Club so I can take some photos for you.

Thanks, by the way, to Road Food for the photo and The Pine Club's website for the logo.