Saturday night and we needed a new place for dinner. Originally, we were going to go to Garlic & Chives down in the OC and meet up with one of our friends down there. For those of you NOT from LA, when traveling to far off neighborhoods (i.e. any ‘hood except your own), you multi-task and make sure to meet up with long forgotten friends. I’d say the upper limit for maintaining a relationship in LA would be 8 miles. Between 8 to 12 miles, it gets real iffy. And anything beyond that might as well be a long distance relationship. But I digress.
Our plans were thwarted when our day drinking buddy said he was too plastered to operate heavy machinery and Uber was surging outta control. Thus, with no need to drive all the way to the OC, we settled on Bo-Beau Kitchen + Roof Tap Bar in Long Beach. Plus, they have happy hour daily till 7pm! We hopped in the car and prayed for no traffic…
Long Beach is such a weird city…it’s got the feel of an urban downtown with the chill of a beach town. I guess it feels like a less exciting San Diego? Although, some would say San Diego is the less exciting San Diego. 🤷🏻♀️
At 6:30pm on a Saturday, it seemed like no one was out and about. We got a table easily. The restaurant has really cool decor and a roof top bar. The roof top bar, though, has a different menu from the restaurant. For the sake of our foodie review, we decided we needed to be able to review the full menu so we chose to sit on their patio in the restaurant section. It did take a while before our server finally came by for our drink order. I guess we should’ve known how the night would progress after that…
For drinks, I went with the sparkling wine on their happy hour menu. It was actually quite good and didn’t taste like the cheap swill American Airlines serves to their first class passengers.
By the way, I’m on a “diet”…which basically means I’m just trying to eat less. I’m inadvertently, intermittently fasting. Basically, when I know I want to have a delicious meal, I only have 1 a day and then I don’t feel guilty for the gorging. I don’t know if I’m losing weight so much as slowing the weight gain. Sigh. Darn my slow metabolism! I say all this to excuse the blurry photos in this blog. I am starving by the time I get to eat and have very little patience to get the shot right before I destroy the dish.
We ended up ordering the shrimp cocktail, French onion soup, Brussels sprouts and sliders from the happy hour menu.
The first round characterized our entire meal. Everything was serviceable but nothing was really memorable. I don’t get it. The restaurant has 1,758 reviews with a total rating of 4 stars! I expected so much more!
The shrimp cocktail was slightly over cooked and the cocktail sauce wasn’t anything special – more ketchup than horseradish. The French onion soup was again, not offensive and definitely eatable but ultimately not craveable. The Brussels sprouts were tasty, slightly too sweet but if you got a nugget of the too infrequent bacon lardons mixed with a healthy chunk of Parmesan, you got a glimpse into what the dish could’ve been. And finally, there were the wagyu beef sliders. This was probably the only really yummy dish of all of them and they were plainish baby burgers. It had the right kind of char flavor and unlike everything else we ordered, it was actually seasoned well.
Now for the off happy hour items…We got the bone marrow and the heirloom tomato salad. The bone marrow was cooked well so that the marrow was silky, not solid and melty but not liquidy. But yet again, there was no discernible seasoning of salt. The heirloom tomato salad was clunky with a random dollop of guacamole on top and what felt like day old burrata on top of that. You know when you’ve opened and cut into the burrata and then you put it back in the fridge because you couldn’t eat the whole ball in one sitting? But then, you try to eat it a day later and it’s lost all its creaminess? That’s what the texture of this was like. And of course, no salt whatsoever. Just 👏 gimme 👏 a 👏 hit 👏 of 👏 the 👏 S! Please!
Our table neighbors had already asked for salt. They were an old couple who had no qualms about potentially offending the chef or restaurant. We politely asked to borrow their salt.
After all those apps, our entrees arrived! And it was as underwhelming as the rest of the meal.
The skirt steak with peppercorn sauce and fries were definitely, totally, just okay. The cook on the steak was perfect. But the peppercorn sauce was a mere drizzle and since they don’t season their food, you really freaking need the sauce. At this point, I need to mention that the patio got busy and the server kept disappearing. Normally, I’d ask for extra sauce upon seeing this meager offering but I knew it wouldn’t arrive by the time my steak became an ice cube. The best thing about the dish were the fries…which…wait for it…were actually salted.
And to round it out, we got the spinach and artichoke flatbread. I was going to get the sausage and potato flatbread. I should’ve gotten it. At least the sausage would’ve probably been a pre-packaged sausage and most likely actually seasoned. This pizza was so bland. I don’t understand how such appetizing food porn can taste so incredibly bland. Oh wait, yes I can. Use salt, people!
At this point, we asked to see the dessert menu, purely for research purposes. But, the server disappeared for upwards of 10 minutes and by then, we were over it. Plus with Pie Bar and the Thickshake Factory just around the corner, we didn’t need it from here. Then again, we should’ve gotten dessert just so we could see if they ironically salted the sweets.
It’s a shame the food is so blah when the food porn for this place is epic. The restaurant is undeniably chic with a great vibe. The drinks are good and the happy hour is a pretty good deal with a nice mix of booze and food. But don’t come here unless you’re on a special diet for people with hypertension which requires you to not eat salt.