Critic's Review
Doc B's has changed their happy hour once again; now it's every day from 4p to 6p. I thought I'd check it out after dropping off a package at Fed Ex.
When they first opened, the outside space didn't have this wall, but now it does. Not sure what that's about.
I walked in shortly after 5p and they had about 50% of the bar seats occupied. No scene here; just the usual older and gay couple crowd trying to save a few bucks by drinking before dinner time.
The seats at the bar are a bit too high. I'm not a tall guy, and I felt like I was in a high chair.
The TVs here serve no purpose; no news on; just ESPN and the NFL network. There aren't any brains at work here.
The only real deal here is on liquor; bottom shelf most likely, for $6. They also have the dreaded "select wines", which means you can't get what you want, for $6, but most of them available are only worth $8 - $9 / glass and I choose not to drink something I don't like just because it's on sale.
All of the tap beers are $4, which to me isn't really much of a deal. Ridiculously, they don't have a menu for the beer. Not even a page with the beers listed; do they have a printer in the office? Print out a list. It's a restaurant.
Rather than trying to have the bartender explain 10 beers to me, I just ordered the Stout.
Now in order to understand the "Happy Hour" here, you need some context. They've tried a few really stupid things here, and the current thing they're trying really stinks. First, for the insult. Check out the Tampa Happy Hour:
Now that's a happy hour. Nothing like that in Fort Lauderdale. Now take a look at the nightly specials menu in Tampa; there's a reason I'm showing this to you.
Notice the description of the items. Now take a look at the Fort Lauderdale Happy Hour food choices. Pretty lame, right? Sides of French Fries and Cole Slaw? Seriously. I didn't want a piece of Fried Chicken. The only thing edible seemed like the $6 burger. With no description on the menu, I had no idea if it was a real burger; What the hell is a "roadside burger". Made with Road Kill? I asked if it was an actual burger rather than a slider, and after getting an affirmative response, I ordered it medium rare. The bartender girl seemed disappointed that I didn't want fries or a side with the burger; I wasn't falling for the $3 for the fries game.
They have 3 WiFi networks and I initially didn't see the "Guest" network, which is what you need to connect to. The music here is completely mismatched with the middle aged crowd: "Teenage Crime", Kygo Feat, "Latch". Absolute garbage music.
The burger came out in 14 minutes. I opened it up and it seemed like your basic burger special burger. I was actually surprised that it came with cheese; Closer examination shows that it's EXACTLY the description of the Tampa "Homage Burger"; the $5 dinner special in Tampa. How innovative!
The burger was delivered without salt, pepper or ketchup. A runner actually had to go into the kitchen to get me ketchup, because they make their own ketchup here, which is never a good thing.
Quote of the day:
He who thinks he can make a better ketchup than Heinz is lost
I cut the burger to see the doneness. Burned and medium. What do I expect for $6 at a wildly overpriced restaurant?
The ketchup, not as good as Heinz of course, was edible and overall the burger was fine. Better medium than raw. But it's delusional to serve this without salt or ketchup.
The Stout exemplifies my experience with "craft" beer. It wasn't as good as Guinness. So what's the point? Why not just sell Guinness? How stupid are Millenials?
Conclusion
LIke my first impression of Doc B's, this happy hour BLOWS. If you drink cocktails at 5pm then maybe you'll like it better than I did. There's no scene, a poorly conceived food menu that isn't that much of a bargain, and cherry picked wines,
Here's what's going on here. They're trying to figure out how stupid we are. Why is the happy hour here not nearly as good as the one in Tampa? Why is there no "daily dinner special" in Fort Lauderdale? Before this offering, Happy Hour was only Thursday through Sunday. I suspect they had an empty bar all week.
Maybe in 2 years they'll have something competitive. What they have now is a joke and is somewhat insulting.
Review 2/23/17
The first big new restaurant to open in Fort Lauderdale for quite a while. Spatch kept us occupied but it's fast-food chicken. This is an actual restaurant.
The first thing you need to know is that this restaurant doesn't understand Florida pricing. They're charging the same price at the Walton Street Chicago location, where the rents are $130/ft, as they are in Fort Lauderdale. The second thing is that the parking is a disaster. They have a valet lot with a one car wide entry in the Fresh Market parking lot. I'd hate to see this place when Fresh Market is open and there are more than 10 people in the place.
Today wasn't one of those days, at least not at 2:30pm. It was a beautiful day and they have a nice outside space, but I wanted to get a feel for the restaurant from the inside. I parked at Fresh Market surmising that they wouldn't have me towed. Doc B's isn't a threat to them at the moment, but they need all of their spots so I expect that to change eventually.
There's a bar in the front with some edgy chairs; I don't particularly like it when places line up the rollups and menus like this. A bar should be inviting; Maybe I just want a beer. I don't want to feel like they don't want me here if I'm not having a $25 lunch. I wasn't sitting at the bar anyway, particularly with nobody here.
"Sit Anywhere", greeted the hostess. Music to my ears. I didn't want to sit near the bar, and I needed to take some good pictures, so I opted for a booth for 2 in the back, figuring I'd have full privacy.
I was wrong, of course, as 5 minutes after I sat down they seated a group of 4 a couple of tables down. A girl who wasn't my server came by to take my beverage order. I ordered an iced tea with extra lemon, as always. I asked her if there were any specials, but she said "Not Yet". She's apparently not trained to tell me the Soup of the Day. Remember this for later.
My dude server came over and asked if I wanted to order an appetizer. The hard sell is in full play here. "No, I'll just have the Cobb Salad, Please". Just after he left, my tea was delivered with a generous supply of lemon.
I kind of like the mini ice cubes. Something different that isn't a bad thing.
One thing clear and obvious is that the music is way too loud; like Yolo on a Saturday night. I think they heard that Fort Lauderdale is a party town, but that doesn't explain why they close at 11 on weekends. Music is pretty good, however, with "People Watching", "Love Myself" and Tim McGraw's "Losing You" detected.
Something else worthy of note is that the booths for 4 are designed for slimish or smaller people. The men in the group of 4 across from me where on the large side and they looked like they were hanging off the end.
No picture as I know one of the guys and I don't want him yelling at me.
The salad came out after 11 minutes.
Ok, well this isn't a Cobb salad in any way or form; and I don't see why they call it a "Knife and Fork" Cobb, because everything is cut up. Let's figure out what we have here.
First, why is there cornbread in my salad? I think they use it to make it look like there's more than there is; cheaper than actual ingredients.
3 pieces of avocado that was much less than 1/2 an avocado, and virtually no egg. See those little white squares? That's the egg. How much is an egg, 18 cents? I expect a whole hard boiled egg in a $15 cobb salad. 1.5 tiny tomatoes. Blue cheese barely detectable.
The dressing was quite good. The point of a cobb is that you get rows of ingredients, so you get about the same amount of each. At Doc B's you get lettuce and cornbread and just a spattering of the other ingredients.
And then there was the chicken.
I thought about ordering this with grilled chicken, but the crispy chicken sounded interesting. I had a picture of a steak sandwich up before that looked like it was stitched together with meat glue, but I took it down because it wasn't my photo. This chicken has the same look.
Chicken Roll? It was dry and tasteless; nothing crispy about it. The breading kind of scared me; it came off in sheets; it wasn't skin; look at the line around the "meat". It's like it was glued on like a bad hairpiece. The chicken "cutlet" may have been completely constructed in an Arts and Craft class.
Does this look like Fresh Chicken to you?
For a place touting a "Fresh Kitchen" this was a sad piece of meat. This is what I'd expect to get at Checkers on their $1 chicken sandwich. After a couple of bites I'd had enough of the chicken.
So the service was cheery and good until I got my food; with only 3 tables in the restaurant and lots of servers probably still training, there were plenty of people. Until 3pm when they all started having lunch. My iced tea was empty and I was almost done before my server sauntered over. His instincts on seeing a table with an empty glass was to offer me a piece of double chocolate cake. "Can I interest you in some double chocolate cake". "No, but I'd like a refill on my iced tea". By the time he went back to the bar and brought back the refill, I was done with the salad.
I fiddled a bit with my phone and he brought over the check so I didn't have to wait for it. Surprisingly, the iced tea wasn't on it, so I can't tell you how much it is. I suspect that because someone else got me the tea it was never entered into the system, but you'd think the server would notice particularly when all I had was the salad and the tea. Is a beverage included with lunch? Are servers already giving out free stuff? I can't say what happened here, but it saved his tip.
Conclusion
My expectations were rock bottom here, mainly because I already knew that they were selling weird food at luxury mall prices. The dining room is nicer than I expected, but I'm surprised at the food. What's worse than an overpriced restaurant that nickels and dimes you on ingredients the first week open?
Frankly, I don't mind paying $15. for a really good cobb with generous portions of ingredients, but what I got didn't measure up. They insult you by loading up the plate with cornbread (or a soggy crouton), while leaving out most of the avocado, egg, bacon and blue cheese. I like to SEE my food. Was there really bacon in my salad? Were those white cubes really egg? No onions, scallions or chives at all? Was that really a chicken at one point in time?
My view is that restaurants like this are cheating their customers. When you charge high prices and use tricks to cut back on ingredients, you're not really providing the product advertised. I suspect that the entire restaurant is a trick, much like Lobster Bar Sea Grill. We shouldn't support such operators. They're not providing a needed service; they're taking up space where an honest restaurantaur could be.
Previous Posts: What Were They Thinking?
So I did a bit of research into Doc B's and learned something quite interesting. Here is a picture of one of their Chicago locations:
This location is in downtown Chicago in between a Nordstrom's and Pistachio accessories store. Inside the Mall:
You girls know what Louboutin and Louis Vuitton are. This is a VERY high end mall, $2500 handbags and $700 pumps.
The Other location is located right across the street from Gucci.
I previously mentioned that the prices at the Fort Lauderdale Location are the same as in Chicago. So this would be the equivalent of a restaurant on 5th Avenue in NYC opening a location in Fort Lauderdale and charging the same prices. It's totally ridiculous,
Their Tampa location is in a mall that is about the equivalent of the Galleria, but it's right next to the airport; so it's designed for tourists. It doesn't show on Google maps as it's fairly new.
Previous Musings
Well, they put up the menu; we previously had the menu from Chicago, and you'd expect that since salaries in Chicago are 10% higher than down here, that prices would be $1 less, right? Wrong. They've raised the prices in Chicago since November, and the prices here are the same.
The Bar menu is even more ridiculous; The least expensive Red is $13/glass and the least expensive white is $11 (for an $8 retail Moscato, which nobody will drink). Babich Black Label Sauvignon Blanc is $15/glass (I found 1 restaurant with this for $8/glass and another for $11).
Add to that no Free Parking; they have valet only parking, and you have to give the guy a couple of bucks. So add that to your $27 lunch.
The parking is crazy. There's an entrance and an exit that's 1 car wide in the Fresh Market parking lot. No marked spots. So if there are 4 cars on line to get in, you can't get out? How can that possibly work?
Doc B's has made a serious miscalculation. This is not an appropriately priced restaurant for this location. This would be overpriced on Las Olas.
And there's nothing ground-breaking about the food, Kale Salad anyone? Not only do they have a cajun chicken sandwich (let's sprinkle some Tony Chachere's on chicken and charge $14 for it), but also cajun "white fish". Can you see me Yawning? Their $23 lobster roll positions them as the most expensive restaurant in the City; $4 more than Lobster Bar Sea Grille and $2 more than Capital Grille. Admittedly Lobster Bar's lobster roll sucks, but CG's is good, and you have the white tablecloth thing to pay for.
Desserts are up 25% and are now all $10.
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