Rookies

Love it. Cheap drinks good food jersey pizza. Boom. Great. 1st in today ill be back again.

You want to know what Rookies Is?  I'll tell you what Rookies is  LOL.  So my parents have a hobby farm in this town and after a rough week of commuting to and from the city they wanted to go out but not too far out...I too was telecommuting from the farm while helping winterize the place.

We decided to try out this place called Rookies, a restaurant open until 8pm on Fridays...yea, it's that kind of town.  It does have a bar attached to it, however, that keeps later hours.  We pulled up in a slushy unpaved parking lot to several vehicles, we thought this place must be poppin' for the S-Burg!  We almost barged in triumphantly, as if to our entrance known into what we thought was an almost packed house, and came into a quaint room about the size of a trailer home but with no walls up, I don't think there were any windows, and there were two other tables occupied, one with a 5-6 person family, and another couple at a table to the North. The rest of the place was empty.

he waitress popped out of the kitchen and caught our stunned 'deer in headlights' gaze and told us to seat wherever we wanted.  Many tables were darker than the other because of a scarcity of lighting, so we picked  a well lit oddity, a table different than the rest with one long bench tucked under one side, to pull out and accomodate oh, maybe 3 people.  The table sat in the corner with booth seating on two sides of it.  I had  to wait for the waitress to get done taking our drink ordres and leave in order to pull the bench out and make room for my legs as I sat on the South wall booth seatingand my parents occupied the booth seating to the East.

They had a salad bar!  And a soup bar!  You had to pick one or the other! Either a big kettle of whatever soup the prepared to the left and a salad bar to the right with iceberg lettuce, olives, 3 dressing choices, and 3 pasta salad choices...that was about it besides the bacon bites and some other oddity that I guess was for the salads.  I'm not sure what that stuff was.

I ordered fried mushrooms for an appetizer, and for dinner I picked the veggie wrap with "shiny" sweet potato fries; the lady of the family ordered a fried chicken patty with mashed potatoes & gravy, and the gentleman ordered the special for the night, prime rib.

Oh, beers (bud light) were $2 a draft.  I think we asked a few things about the ingredients while ordering, for example we asked what made the sweet potatoes "shiny", the server had no idea what was in anything...We gather we could've asked if it was salt or parmesan cheese in the sugar shaker and not get a definite answer out of her.  

The whole scenario led us to a few whispered laughs, including a mockery of the bar that was through a door in the middle of the room but we heard absolutely no noise coming from the direction.  We were a bit nervous about what to expect, judging from the salads my parents tried to make up "the bacon bits are good" the step-dad said, I almost cried tears of laughter at that comment.

The mushrooms came out hot on the outside, icy in the middle, "oh boy" I thought, and sent it back to be heated up after trying two of them with the same icey results.  The basket was also pretty sparse, and it did come back, not any fuller, and the remaining 6 or 7 pieces were hot enough for us.

The meals came out and I had to say I was a little impressed just at looks; presented to us was that home-cooking you kind of hope for out of a diner such as this.  The "shiny" sweet potato fries weren't necessarily "shiny", but it's dip that came out in a small tin can reminiscent of just about anything you'd expect from a highly popular establishment out of Denver, and it surprised me.  What's this?  A special dipping sauce they made for the sweet potato fries?  I dared ask, "do you know what's in this dip" to the server...of course she didn't, but they take 6 hours to make it...What? A tiny tin can with dipping sauce that had more time put into it than anything else in this establishment?

it was delicious too.  I could recognize a few things but not put my finger on any proportions; vinegar, sugar, and I assumed an Italian spice, not basil (which we actually use in a family recipe), something with more bite.    

The step dad gave a thumbs up to the prime rib, but I hesitate as I know he is simple to please, and the mom liked her chicken fried steak very well.  I got to sample the mashed potatoes, which were great, and was given the roll from the fried chicken plate.  They didn't even bother heating it up before sending out to us and my guess was they were bought earlier in the week and kept at room temp.  

The bar is through the door marked "Saloon and Restrooms", another door opens into the bar, which was very lively.  We just peeked and left.

All in all, some parts of the meal were great, but they really failed on so many simple levels that you kind of want them to get retrained on the customer experience and they could really be a great place.