Pleasantly surprised at Pinstripes Happy Hour
Thinking it would be a good "family" thing - bought a groupon for Pinstripes some time ago. Of course, as planned, I forgot all about it until I got the email alert yesterday afternoon that it expired that day. Called, and sorry, no bowling or bocce - they are all corporate evented up. FYI: located just south of Southdale next to West Elm and the Container Store, Pinstripes is a huge and quite upscale complex with bar, dining room, outdoor seating and bocce and bowling lanes. Apparently it is VERY popular with corporate events which made me immediately suspicious.
Checked out the website and saw they had Happy Hour and off we went. Firstly, no bowling or bocce was going on in the first floor lanes, even though you could not rent them. Odd. Off to the bar. Not great seating. Only two banquettes and four tops with chairs with no backs. Looked uncomfortable. We got one of the two banquettes. Good service. Nice little small bites and pizza/flat bread menu. Huge drink menu. HH prices on food, but not drinks. Ordered calamari right off, along with a Louisiana BBQ shrimp dish. I ordered a house Lemoncello Martini (way too sweet) and hubs got a bombay. Both $10. Child ordered Fanta Orange (and to my great chagrin, they give refills. Apparently unlimited refills. Three 16oz Fantas later my kid is crawling up the walls and hanging from the ceiling howling - note to self, unless they are offering free refills on the Martini's, stop them after one).
The food comes fairly quickly and the calamari is good. The tomato sauce it is served with is pretty blah, but the calamari rings and tentacles are nicely breaded and not too greasy. At $6 a bargain. The surprise is the shrimp. Large plate with toast points and on toast with a lovely almost remoulade sauce are 6 very large jumbo beautiful shrimp served with a little mixed green salad with shaved Parmesan. These are also $6. This was much more like an entree and we were happily surprised at the size and quantity. Trying to be kid friendly we inquired about the pizza/flat bread menu, which had about eight choices that looked interesting. They suggested the chicken club flatbread with avocado and having seen one go by, went for it. Served on a long board, it was six decent slices with grilled chix, applewood bacon, onion and avocado. Really good. And again, cheap. Saw a couple pizzas go by also and they looked to be around 14". All for around $6. They also had quite a few other items on the HH menu I would have tried: tenderloin and Italian meatball sliders, stuffed mushrooms, and more.
Didn't even look at the real menu. Did notice a large wine and beer selection. And that it got a lot busier as HH continued. Overall, I was impressed with the food and prices. For being so swank, it was a pretty good deal.
