As part of their ongoing mission to own all the restaurants, the Rockpool group has recently completed a massive expansion, including opening a branch of The Barvarian at Charlestown, and a branch of the Beerhaus at Kotara. Their website claims "The Bavarians is a collection of Australia’s greatest German inspired food, drinking and entertainment venues". Hmm. Well they have quite a collection and the restaurants are BIG. In fact the Beerhaus we visited today was huge. But it wasn't so German - with a mostly American inspired menu and a sports theme complete with pingpong, fussball, and basketball hoops. Luckily pingpong balls don't actually hurt when they're smashed into you by a gang of 8 year olds.
It was a pleasant surprise to walk into a beer barn and find they had table service and the wait staff were lovely. Matt had a hankering for some 'murrican food and we soon ordered drinks and appealing sounding fried things and sat back to wait for delcious things to be brought to us. And Wait we did. Not somewhere to go for a quick lunchbreak, you really need to commit your time. After what felt like 20 minutes our drinks finally appeared. Domain Chandon for me (a reasonable $13) and a Hofbrau Dunkel Lager ($13 for 500ml) for Matt.
Our first plates of food soon followed. Deep fried Pickles ($9) sounded great. They were quite overcooked though so all you could really taste was the breading. Our potato skins ($11) came out with them. They were described as loaded with chorizo, mozzarella, scallions and chipotle aioli. Good thing they weren't described as "piping hot" because they were sadly only just luke-warm. Before we were quite finished our starters, our actual lunch came out. Two for one Tuesday meant we ordered the popcorn shrimp ($18) and the buffalo chicken ($17) po' boys. And that, ladies and gentlemen is where an ordinary meal desended to one we'll talk about for months. Like the pickles, the prawns were so massively overcooked all you got was the crunch and no flavour There were nine bits of prawn on the roll so not an overgenerous number. The (four pieces of) chicken itself wasn't terrible (and it was actually hot!). But it's a good thing they were half price because I sure don't think they were worth their normal charge. On both sandwiches the baguette they were served on was so stale we both discarded it and just ate the fillings.
Not a cheap lunch, $64 for some fried stuff and one drink each. We'd really been looking forward to it - American junk food is just so tasty - but ultimately had to say despite the pleasant wait staff we didn't love it at all. It was overpriced and not well cooked food, with undergenerous serves (unlike their sister restaurant beer barn, The Barvarian); ultimately an exercise in disapointment not one of gustatory delight.
