Pork Slope Review: Pork Slope Fail
I think the main thing that Big Brother needs to teach in schools how to learn. The second thing would be how to deal with failure. For example, if you ever watch a press conference with one of the Williams sisters after they lose a tennis match, it’s always on the lines of (and I’m paraphrasing), “I didn’t play well, and that’s why she won.” It’s never framed like “My opponent played better than me by exploiting my weaknesses.” That’s what all great athletes do. They brush it off, they move on. That doesn’t really happen when there’s bad coverage of restaurants. Usually the chefs and restauranteurs do not take it well which is odd when you think about it. I would assume that successful people deal with failure well, and that’s how they adapt and move on… but maybe successful people are actually more like the Williams sisters and just forget about the bad days and steamroll ahead. I think in a way, angry reactions to bad press deters some food bloggers from writing bad things about certain places. And I’m not about to say that Pork Slope is all bad because I haven’t tried the entire menu. But I’ve said this before, since I’m spending hard earned dollars, I actually don’t need to be fair to anyone about what is written here because it wasn’t fair for me to have a shitty food experience for any reason, much less from a place where the food is being promoted by a Top Chef alum. Let’s start with the drinks.
We see this often with restaurants I think, where they really want you to order alcohol because the alternative sucks. And the alternative sucks because they want you to order alcohol. Take coke for instance. This should be easy to do, but I’m guessing a bar in Park Slope doesn’t serve up too many cokes that aren’t mixed with alcohol. Straight up coke. I hate it when places give you 3/4th cup of ice and the rest is coke. Just look at the left cup in the picture, that shit is almost all ice. We didn’t order a cup of ice with a drizzle of coke. We ordered coke. It really brings out the chink in me because now more often than not, I order it like this, “Coke, no ice please.” This time we should have done that too. Fail. But this is where your champion athlete mentality comes into play as a diner. Naw, it wasn’t that I should have ordered it without ice. It’s that they tricked me. See how that works?
The wings were OK. For $13 dollars, you kind of expect it to be OK. By that I mean, for slightly over priced wings, they have got to at least be serviceable. These were like that, but not something that I would go out of my way to try again or anything like that. If you had to decide between the burger or the wings, definitely get the wings…
This brings us to the biggest fail of the day – the cheeseburger. I would have thought that if you’re a Top Chef dude, you would instruct your servers to ask the customer to what temperature they want the burger cooked. And then if the ticket has no temperature on it, the cook would tell the server, “Hey, go ask how they want this cooked.” Now I get it if the bar is PACKED but we wuz there in the middle of the afternoon and the bar wasn’t packed at all. So instead of asking, they just cooked it all the way through. Yay! Dry burger!
I don’t know what to tell you about the burger. I have no idea if it could have been juicy if cooked properly. I have no idea if it could taste like anything besides being dry. I will say that they did not fuck up the tater tots, but you know, it takes a lot to fuck up deep fried potatoes, so how much credit can you give for doing tater tots correctly? I wonder if the tater tots are made from scratch or if they’re purchased pre-formed/frozen. Either way, the tots were splendid. They were the lone highlight of the day.
Overall I thought the experience at Pork Slope was not a good one. Maybe a different server wouldn’t have gone overboard with ice and a different cook would have cooked it to medium by default. But who knows? I was excited about Pork Slope before going and when a place is over an hour away from your apartment by train, the disappointment can be overwhelming. It’s not enough to be like, “Oh it’s their livelihood.” Well don’t fuck up the burger goddamn it. And don’t make me feel like I wasted my money. Isn’t that my livelihood too? What should I care more about? My own? or someone else’s?
Pork Slope247 5th Ave.Brooklyn, NY 11215718-768-7675
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