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Finishline no contender in local restaurant race
| Thursday, Jul 8 2004 8:15 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Feb 10 2006 10:34 AM
In most hotels it's hard to get a distinctive restaurant concept going. There's the bad image, and the fact that most of your customers are transients too tired to venture into a community they may not know to find a good meal. Sure, some places try harder (The original Red Lion, Holiday Inn Select downtown), but most struggle.
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Take the Red Lion, for example. When it moved into a remodeled hotel south of the original Red Lion (currently the DoubleTree), it opened Smokin' Joe's Beach Bar and Woodfired Cuisine. I can understand why no one got too hot about that one. Outside of crab cakes, the food was pretty ordinary. Putting up cool surfboards and serving linguine with tequila-spiked cream sauce doesn't cut it.
Enter concept two, a natural in a car-crazy town like Bakersfield. The Finishline Sports Bar & Grill. Work out some meet-and-greets with Mesa Marin drivers, slap a few signed hoods and Budweiser racing signs on the wall and we're hitting on all cylinders, drafting off the increasing popularity of NASCAR.
Reality check: it's a lot like Smokin' Joes, only with duller videos. We went and sampled a variety of items and found it to be dressed up variations on standard and unimaginative hotel cuisine. But the menu writer was working overtime, calling onion rings "piston rings" and putting the term "800 horsepower" on the chicken strips appetizer but only "400 horsepower" on the chicken strips meal.
"Does that mean you get eight of them?" my companion logically asked.
"I'm not sure what it means," the waitress logically replied.
Charmed by these continual mechanical references, I went for the "prop kill" fish and shrimp combo ($14.49), though minutes later a man at a nearby table later yelled out, "Don't get the fish and chips! They're terrible!" He was a bit late on that yellow caution flag for me.
He wasn't far off. Both the five shrimp and the three fish strips were not fresh battered. The clam chowder served with it was a simple clams-celery-potatoes version that, from a distance, reminded my companion of cat food. Ouch.
There is a small pizza on the menu ($5.95 for a cheese, and 50 cents for each extra topping) that might be a tempting choice for the kids, as long as they like Boboli crusts. Heck I could dress one up like that at the end of a long work day. The "400 horsepower" chicken fingers ($10.49) came from the same freezer that was the proud home of my fish and shrimp.
My companion, deftly trying to steer through the carnage brought on by the rest of us, went for the Southwest salad ($8.49), which seemed certain to take the checkered flag if only because of its menu description. It said greens would be used, not lettuce. That's always a promising description. It would be crowned with cheddar and jack cheese, tomato, onion. The legendary big salad that nutritionists would endorse.
Into the pit with that one. The chicken was pretty dull and there was little cheese in evidence. Sure, there was some actual greens mixed in, but iceberg was dominant.
Service was OK. Our waitress was pleasant enough, but the restaurant was severely understaffed. It seemed like just her handling everyone. Also, we were overcharged for the pizza. Apparently the computer wasn't adjusted from the Smokin' Joe's prices.
One warning for Entertainment Card holders: Finishline won't accept the offer from Smokin' Joes because, we were told, "the name has changed."