Rustic Road Brewing Company — Restaurant in Kenosha

Rustic Road in Kenosha is known for brewing good craft beers, and they do it well. Their new location has added a full bar, wine and food menu. This is where they started to fall short.

We stopped in for drinks and dinner on a Wednesday evening to try out their food options on a slower night of the week. My girlfriend ordered their specialty drink, the Rustic Fashioned, (play on an Old Fashioned choice of Bourbon or Brandy) and I ordered one of their craft beers on tap. The beer was lightly hoppy and had great flavor, and the Rustic Fashioned was also made well. When it came time to order another drink, they ran out of Brandy and said they did not have any Brandy left in house. The beer was an easy one, since it is brewed in house, and I got another. My girlfriend decided on just getting a ginger ale, since they ran out of Brandy.

Our food came out and looked presentable on the tin trays they served it on. My girlfriends Brisket sandwich came out with a cold bun, very little BBQ sauce on it and was very dry. She had the pub chips with it, they were overcooked and salt distribution on them was either a lot on one or none on the other. I ordered a Rustic burger with double cheese, grilled onions, thick cut bacon and tomatoes. What I received was a burger cooked to temp with no seasoning, no tomatoes, lightly grilled onions that were very crunchy and burnt crunchy bacon. Needless to say both entries were semi-edible, but not at all what we expected to receive.

Rustic Road does well with their craft beers, but they honestly fail at their food preparations and should try to focus more on them if they want to continue having a kitchen. We will not be back to try any of their...

I heard many good things about this spot, so I was excited to taste what folks have been raving about. I was disappointed. Our waitress/bartender was doing well and did a great job balancing all of the tasks while being the only one behind the bar. She's the reason why I gave RR an "okay" rating.

I asked for a mimosa. I was given orange juice that went bad. It tasted like orange juice and vinegar were mixed together. Our waitress was very kind when she switched out drinks.

We ordered both appetizers. The fried green pickles were not completely done. There was still batter on the inside. I was very excited to have this Southern staple, but I was disappointed with the outcome.

Our main course comes and was also underwhelming. My friend's burger was not seasoned. He felt that it was flavorless. I did the "choose three sliders": Fried chicken with creamy lemon pepper sauce, Italian beef with giardiniera, and the brisket with onion, pickles and house sauce. The fried chicken has far too much lemon pepper sauce; it took away from the actual taste of the chicken. The Italian beef was probably the best one of the three, but still did not have a lot of flavor that I am used to with this sandwich. The brisket had far too much sauce. I could not taste the flavor of the brisket. The chips also tasted like old oil and almost like they were fried too long.

I've heard good things about this place. I hope maybe that it was an "off" day. From my first and only tasting, I would not recommend this...

Saturday 6/15 around 2:30 pm

My wife went in to flag down to ask if it was okay if we sit outside with our dog and order lunch. The two women Sabrina Y and another dark haired woman with tats would not even look at her. Walked past, went behind the bar, turned their backs started chatting each other up. Finally turned and deigned to greet or respond. Okay. We got waters and my wife carried the menus out.

10 minutes later, I went in and asked if they were "still serving lunch? If not It's okay we can go down the block." No we didn't see you there and didn't know you were outside. (We had just been seated by the dark haired woman with tats. The lighter haired woman was totally throwing non verbal attitude, the expression on her face telegraphing contempt. Finally arriving at our table, she took the order and asked for my card, because "You're outside and sometimes people run off." I'm 60 years old and my wife is 55 and the dog is geriatric. Long and short of it is, the attitude and service was out of proportion to the fact that the restaurant was empty, the geographic location and the level of physical beauty of the servers.

Kind of made lunch suck. We still tipped 20%.

C'mon!

Food was great, beer was great, the attitude and behavior...