My Floog

Beach Grass Café

September 28, 2009

Beach Grass Café | 159 S Highway 101, Solana Beach, CA 92075 | 858.509.0632

After having a great experience at their Poway location, I noticed a 50% off dinner promotion at their Solana Beach spot. That was enough incentive for me to gather the troops and head over for some discounted dishes.

Since everything was on special, we decided to share some appetizers before dinner. We ordered the tasty sounding fried calamari with wasabi aioli and their hand-cut fries with homemade ketchup. To our dismay, there was only like 5 pieces of calamari in the entire order and the waitress arrived with a bottle of Heinz instead of what we thought might be something homemade. The calamari tasted decently enough but would not have nearly been worth the full price of $10. The fries and ketchup had us totally perplexed and we finally asked if there was in fact a homemade ketchup. Only after we had finished the fries did the fresh stuff finally arrive and it was actually very good. Unfortunately, the only thing we had to enjoy with it was our forks since it took so long to arrive. At a full price of $6, we would definitely not order it again.

One of my friends and I decided to go with their rib eye steak (full price of $24) served with garlic mashed potatoes and our other friend went with the pan seared sea bass with ginger Arborio rice. While rib eyes are supposed to be fatty and well marbled, I found my rare steak to be unbelievably fatty and was extremely difficult to eat. It was seasoned just fine and didn’t really need the balsamic reduction on top, but it didn’t really take anything away from the steak either. The sea bass was tender and fatty, just the way I like it, but the carrots were firm and barely cooked at all. The rice was cooked into a kind of risotto which was nice, but the carrots had no business on the plate.

The overall experience was mediocre at best and without the discount, the food is not strong enough on its own to draw me back. Service was lackluster and inattentive and very few trips were actually made to check out our table despite the restaurant being very slow. While I enjoyed breakfast at their Poway location, the dinner menu here was very disappointing.

Food: 6/10

Service: 6/10

Price: $$

Atmosphere: 7/10

Filed under: Uncategorized