Tag Archives: American cuisine

Kalamazoo Beer Exchange

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Last night, December 21st, 2010 we got together with our friends and headed to a new restaurant on Water Street in downtown Kalamazoo. This old building was District 211 first, a restaurant that served really odd food at really high prices, then it became Charlie Fosters, which was a smoky Chicago faux-mobster dive and that too failed. In its current incarnation it’s Kalamazoo Beer Exchange.

This new restaurant has a very nice interior and thanks to the statewide smoking ban actually is pleasant to enter. The wait staff really aren’t that interested in welcoming new diners to the restaurant, one may think that they are simply overworked, but we noticed them chatting and ignoring a build-up of new diners at the front door, so take that for what it’s worth. Once we were seated we got our menus, which were fine. This establishment serves bar-food and bistropub food, an odd high-brow/low-brow mix which is cute and innocuous. When you sit down the focus of the bar area is the market-ticker display, a giant flat panel television with the prices of every carried draft beer, and they have about 30 of them available. We asked for a menu of their beer provisions and they didn’t have a menu for their drafts. So you pretty much just had the brand and the name to go by. The gimmick is not readily apparent at first glance and it took a verification question to our waitress to figure out what it all meant. Draft beer prices are adjusted every 15 minutes by the popularity of the beer. So if Bud Light sells a LOT, the price goes up. If beers don’t sell well at all, the price drops. So each 15 minute cycle you could pay $4.25 for a 22-ounce glass of beer, or $3.25 a bit later. The gimmick is cute and does set them apart, but it eventually does lead to irritation as the popularity-feedback-loop means that value is pretty much out the window – a beer isn’t expensive because it’s good beer, a beer is expensive because townies make it one way or another. Case in point, Bud Light was 4.25 and Labatts was 3.25. Ohhh-kay.

As for the food, that was the biggest heartbreak for this place. The burger was top-notch, really well done. The soup was okay, I could have taken or left it either way, but the one thing that blew my mind and ruined the entire experience was the value-added french fries. That’s right, you have to pay an extra dollar to get fries instead of potato chips. So I was forewarned that the fries were overseasoned before and that perhaps they had corrected the problem. Well, obviously not. The dollar-more fries were HORRIBLE. Overseasoned was the weakest description possible for what was slung on a plate. The salt level was beyond anything that I had previously experienced. If I was responsible for perpetrating those french fries and charging money for it, I would be living in a constant fear of being lynched.

That being said, our first experience was a massively bad one. The gimmick is worth a chuckle at first but eventually gets very old very quickly. The food suffers from those unforgivable abominations they call French Fries, and the cost, $32 for 2 people is too high for what you get. We won’t ever return to this restaurant and it’s one of many downtown that we regard as never-agains. It ranks up there with Food Dance in over-expensive pretension trying to masquerade as anything but bottom-of-the-barrel dining. If the initial experience doesn’t drive you off, then either gastroenteritis or kidney failure will.

SmashBurger – Kalamazoo, MI

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Today, on August 11th, 2010 a new burger joint called SmashBurger opened on West Main Road in Kalamazoo, MI. Scott, Craig, and I decided to try them out for dinner, along with a fair amount of the rest of Kalamazoo, they were very very busy.

I had a Classic SmashBurger, Scott put together one of his own featuring sauteed mushrooms and onions and Craig had a Michigan Olive Burger. For sides, Scott had the classic french fries, and I had deep-fried Dill pickles.

We walked into a clean and orderly restaurant with a very compact and on-first-glance well designed approach and order area, we ordered our food, the total for Scott and my meal came to just under $20. Craig’s came out to just about $10. After we ordered we were given a number flag that went with our order and wandered away. The first failure hit then, we weren’t given cups that went along with our order and had to ask for them, this isn’t anything out of the ordinary as we have to do that for a few restaurants in the area. Once we had our cups, that’s when we ran into our first problem. The fountain service is to the far left and it is not at all obvious where the lids are kept. I walked up to the fountain depot and already the Low Ice alarm light was blinking. I put my 16oz cup under the Coke Zero spigot and tried it, the Coke Zero sprayed horizontally and covered my hand with mix and a big carbonated squeal. Only when I looked much closer did I discover that there was an “Out Of Order” label that was printed using black ink on a clear plastic label and attached to a dark piece of plastic just under the Coke Zero display. I got slightly vexed and switched to Diet Coke instead, which was just as well. With my hands covered in Coke Zero mix and what amounted to fizzy club soda I walked back to the bathrooms. What I expected was a standard restaurant bathroom setup, Men/Women, big enough for multiple users at once. SmashBurger’s bathrooms were single use rooms and there was a line of 4 men doing the pee-pee dance, I didn’t need to wash my hands THAT badly. As I walked to the bathrooms I was amazed at how much space was wasted in the long hallways to the bathroom area, whoever designed the layout to that restaurant did them a disservice.

Once I returned to the table we waited for our meals to be walked out to us. It quickly struck us that nobody was really paying any attention to the number-flag system for the orders and they were wandering around asking people what they ordered and seeing if it matched what they were carrying. Scott and I got our food first, then after a few minutes Craig got his order. I immediately had a problem with what I saw in my order, The Burger I ordered was delivered open-faced and the patty/cheese combo was wedged underneath the tureen that held my side-dish. When I moved the tureen I saw that some of the cheese was stuck to it and came away from the burger. So right from the start my food was smushed up against the outside of another serving dish and I had to fight down a little bit of irritation, it didn’t *have* to be that way. On to the burger itself, it had it’s own problems. The SmashBurger Burger that I received was assembled hastily and the burger began to immediately fragment as I started to manipulate it on the serving dish it came on, trying to pick it up. As I started to eat I noticed not a dripping of meat juices but a veritable raining / deluge of juices running out. SmashBurger cheats. They sear and sling, the meat doesn’t have time to dry out since it’s delivered in a heartbeat right off the grill. As I ate, I had to lean very far forward so the gushing juices could land in the serving dish and not against my shirt or in my lap. As I ate, the meat slid to one side and the vegetation slid to the other side. This was because the burger was sent out of the kitchen open-faced. The meat didn’t have time to melt the cheese and help the vegetation stay in place. As I ate it was mostly the hamburger first, and then at the end a bread-covered salad. Once I was done speed-eating the burger (since it was gushing juices so very much) I reorganized my dishes and tried the fried pickles.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a salt hound. I love salt, I can’t get enough of salt and I always season everything to my liking and it’s always proper. Even I, as a salt hound, found the fried pickles to be shockingly salty. The taste was SSSAAALLLTTT pickle dill.

After I finished my meal and my drink I got to thinking about how everything was organized in this restaurant. There are no “Meals” or “Baskets”, everything is a-la-carte, you get a dollar discount on the sides if you order a sandwich, but that’s it. I started polling the table for opinions and Scott was very displeased and Craig was shrugging along with the rest of us. What we got wasn’t $20 worth of food, at most it was $12 worth of food. SmashBurger is in direct competition with Culvers, and from what we saw tonight SmashBurger will not be able to compete with Culvers. I posed a question to the table, “If you had a half-tank of gas, as we do now, and you were driving from downtown, would you stop here and have dinner or would you drive on another 5 minutes and go down 9th Street to the Culvers by the I-94 interchange?” Everyone was in agreement that Culvers would be the preferred destination by far.

Earlier today we stopped at Culvers for lunch and I had a vastly superior burger and fries, Scott got a burger and chili-cheese fries and the total was $15.03 for the entire meal, with fountain drinks. Culvers superiority coupled with it’s relative inexpensiveness in comparison with SmashBurger is really damning.

On our way out of the restaurant we were effectively trapped and prevented in our leaving by a SmashBurger employee who took it upon themselves to begin spraying the glass door with Windex and wiping it down. There is only one door, and there we stood for about 30 seconds while we waited for the SmashBurger employee to conclude their needless glass cleaning task. It stunned me, that they elect to have someone wiping down the glass doors during the massively busy dinner crowd, just getting in the way, preventing people from entering or leaving. Since this was the ONLY DOOR in or out I did feel a slight shine of irritation that I couldn’t exit until they were done doing a needless task.

The manager of the establishment was wandering around like a lost puppy bumping into customers and tables, during the mad dinner press he was bounding from table to table, getting in the way. He asked how everything was and Scott and Craig were fine, I was busy chewing. By the time I was done he had bounded off to another table. What I had to say wouldn’t have made him feel very good anyways, so I kept my peace.

SmashBurger enjoyed an insanely busy opening day, the honeymoon period in it’s prime. After our experience we decided that we would give SmashBurger one more shot, and we’ll do so on September 11th, 2010 – one calendar month from now. Scott mentioned “If they are still open by then…”

Then once we were in the car, I asked everyone for their ranking scale and the score they gave SmashBurger Kalamazoo. Scott gave them 2/5. Craig gave them 2.5/5. My score is 1/5.

One thing that struck me was, SmashBurger’s grand opening could have been far more successful if they had tried a soft open a week earlier with invited guests. “Please come to our new Restaurant and have a meal on us, critical feedback is greatly appreciated” and that would have caught the lid problem, the label problem, and most likely the salt problem.

I don’t see SmashBurger being very successful, I see the competition walking away with their money. There are so many other better places to eat lunch or dinner with similar themes. Culvers, Red Robin, and even Sonic are better than SmashBurger. I can agree with Scott, if they are around in a month, I’ll be surprised.