Barnaby’s is a classic between the restaurants in Tacoma, Washington. It is a big building, decorated in a German style, with a lot of beer fabrication tools in display, and pictures of different places in Germany. It has several independent rooms for banquets, conventions or parties, all around the central point which is the bar. The floor is completely covered by thick carpets, and the walls by wooden panels. It does not look bad, but it will welcome a needed renovation, mainly the carpet.
When we arrived, we had to wait for several minutes to someone came to us at the checking in desk. I don’t understand the reason the desk was empty, and was like this all night, with employers coming and going but with nobody there all the time.
We went to the bar to have a drink. They had a good selection of foreign beer to choose from, and the Long Island Iced Tea was strong but very tasty. The drinks didn’t come with a complimentary dish of appetizers, that is disappointing in a supposedly good restaurant.
The first courses were salads, and we made a civilized line at the salad bar to choose ours. There were not a big selection, the base was a plain lettuce and the toppings varied from nuts to black olives and very regular croutons. The dressings were not too bad, the blue cheese one was the best of them, but nothing to get too excited about.
The service was not exactly fast, the waitresses were nice young women dressed in Bavarian type of costumes who obviously needed more experience.
The second course for me was the famous Rock Salt Prime Rib. Barnaby’s base its reputation in this dish, and I was expecting something exceptional. My first impression was not so good: the meat was cold. That, for me, kills completely the prime rib taste. I ordered my meat medium rare, but it was way too cooked. But the main problem was that it was very plain, without any flavor. The rock salt did not show anywhere on the meat, and the taste was rubbishy.
The homemade mashed potatoes side dish that came with the meat was good, much better than the prime rib, but again, it was cold when it arrived to the table. For me, that dish was a real disappointing experience.
My husband ordered the center cut steak. Besides been cold too, the meat didn’t have the lean quality that anybody would expect from the cut, and the sauce was too heavy. Nothing very impressive neither.
The amount of food in the dishes is small, so we fed ourselves with the bread and butter, the best, with difference, of all the food the place offered. The wine was not bad, a red Cabernet Avignon from the house, so, with the wine and the bread and butter we survived to the night.
We were so disappointed that we skipped dessert, but the worst still was to come. The bill was absolutely ridiculous! For the two of us, they charged more than sixty dollars, (excluding the drinks at the bar, which we paid at the counter), and we didn’t have dessert.
The Barnaby’s restaurant experience was not good, and really expensive. I don’t recommend it, there are plenty of better restaurants in the are much better and with reasonable prices.
