I will start my first review with our most recent lunch out, today at the recently opened BlackFinn American Grille in the St. Louis Galleria. This place took over the old Mark Shale location that had been empty for a while and was last occupied with the BODIES Exhibit of plasticized corpses a year or so ago. That is rather weird to think you could be eating where there used to be dead Chinese people with plastic pumped into their muscles. I am glad I did not remind my mother-in-law that was what used to be where we were eating lunch.
When we entered the restaurant through the "front" entrance, it was interesting to see the front was actually the very northern end of the old Mark Shale. From a 2007 Google StreetView you can see the end of the old building as it looked then opposed to the fancy revolving door there now.
It has a nice covered awning in front which is really nice for when it is raining, like it was today, but unfortunately someone was just idling there in front for several minutes for no apparent reason besides blocking traffic.
After we first made our way through the revolving door, we were directed to the left which appears to be the family dining area. There were a few other patrons there, and we noticed many of them had children in their groups. The area was well decorated with large colorful photos of the St. Louis area, and unusual lamps that looked like trophies. We were seated at a booth and between the four us we ordered the Margarita flatbread, the Haddock sandwich, the St. Louis flatbread and the Balboa prime rib sandwich. As we waited my son had to pull out his iPod Touch, so I asked him to check out the WiFi there, and he was able to see at least 4 access points, two named "Dining Area" and two named "Grille Area". It seems like they must have pretty good coverage there. It was not too noisy and we could talk fairly easily with some canned country music in the background. Overall the ambiance was pretty nice and the menu had quite a bit of variety. We were afraid we could only choose off the rather limited Brunch menu at first, but were told we could pick from the Lunch or Dinner menu as well. Their prices ranged from under $10 to well over $25 so you could go for something small or have a pretty substantial dinner there.
When our food arrived, the flatbreads were served on elevated rectangular wooden planks and they were cut into six triangles placed as three squares in a row. Both sandwiches were served with a generous portion of fries and small metal ketchup containers. Unfortunately, none of us were overly impressed with the food. My Balboa sandwich was good but nothing exceptional and that seemed the same case with the flatbreads. My son actually mentioned he thought the Chartwells flatbreads at his high school cafeteria were better than the BlackFinn ones. My mother-in-law had the haddock sandwich and thought it did not taste overly fresh and was somewhat too fishy. We were optimistically hoping this would be a great place to have lunch since it is so close and convenient to our home, but unfortunately the food quality did not match the decor and general ambiance which we really liked.
Comments
Post a Comment