In the never-ending battle against lame food, I was almost handed defeat today.
I was up at 3:15am to catch a 6am flight from the east coast to Reno for an afternoon meeting, and from there, another flight to San Jose, California.
By the time I got off the plane in Cali, it was almost 9:30 eastern time.
I was beaten. Tired. Whooped. And I still had an hour drive.
The situation screamed for a drive-thru at McDonald’s.
But after seeing this horrible space-robot sculpture thing in the San Jose Airport, I changed my mind.
After all, if an “artist” can spend hours and hours and hours on a stupid looking white robot thing, the least I can do is spend an hour relaxing and drinking beer with some good food.
So I chose the Rock House Sports Pub and Grill in Livermore, California—about halfway between the airport and my final destination of Lathrop.
Rock House has your typical sports bar decor and looks like THE place to be during football season. The inside is huge with flat screen tv’s everywhere. I was only in the bar area, so you can’t tell just how large it is from the photos, but there had to be at least 50 tv’s in the place.
The beer selection was great. I counted 20 beers on tap, and the only American puke beers I saw were Coors Light, Bud Light and Budweiser. Everything else was either a nice import, a microbrew, or a specialty beer.
I began sipping on an Anchor Steam, a nice medium-bodied beer out of San Francisco, while I took a look at the menu.
The menu was very expansive by sports bar standards. They have your usual fare—like burgers and wings—but they also serve pastas and have an entire page of Mexican dishes.
And they serve garlic fries, which is a favorite of mine.
I considered them briefly, along with the fish tacos, but settled on the beef burrito.
Unfortunately, that was a mistake.
First, it came with a foil wrapper, which is just a pain in the butt. This isn’t Chipotle!
Second, the tortilla wasn’t your usual flour tortilla. It was green. And not a Mexican green either.
I strongly suspect they used either a sun-dried tomato basil tortilla, or one with Italian spices. Fortunately, the flavor wasn’t overpowering, but it didn’t go at all with the theme.
Also, my burrito wasn’t cooked evenly throughout. Some of the rice was still hard and got stuck in my teeth.
For California, this is unacceptable. Seriously, you can’t find a Mexican around here to make a proper beef burrito?
Have they all been deported or something?
Okay, bad joke. Bad, bad joke.
Anyways, to be fair, hitting any sports bar on a Monday afternoon in the summer is iffy. The crowd here was sparse and mostly in their mid-twenties to late-thirties. I’m sure they were more interested in drinking than eating.
Fortunately, so was I. Afterall, any day you get to have an ice-cold Anchor Steam on draft is a good day! And I got out of there for less than $20 with a tip, so I can’t complain too much.
In conclusion, I’d go back, but definitely try something else—either the fish tacos or maybe those garlic fries.
Rating: Would wear a free shirt.
