The good:
No crowd for dining...even on Father's Day! Friendly staff. Historic building and interior. Got a table with a good view of Bozeman Main Street bustle. Really good background music at the perfect volume for dining.
The bad:
There are reasons for no dinner crowd*
Here the dining used to
Be a delicious culinary experience. Now, the experience is, no vision, no direction, no Bacchus-Better-Half (unless you consider the 'pub' to be the better half instead of the dining). Even the god of merriment knows great food goes hand-in-hand with refreshing libations. Sadly, it would seem the menu was forgotten after the first happy hour drinks were served. Tsk. Tsk.
The anticipated experience:
Sometimes I just get a craving for a favorite kind of food and nothing else will satisfy. This is the case of a timeless classic, The Rubin Sandwich. I am a lover of the Rubin and have been all my adult life. The pan fried Rye bread. The thick juicy center of corned beef, the tang of the mouthwatering sauerkraut that adds great flavor and helps to prevent a dry sandwich, and most of all. The amazing taste of traditionally made Thousand Island dressing...critical to the composition of the piece, dare I say, Masterpiece? Uhh...well, no. I daren't say that word.
The reality experience:
Forget everything I just described above (save, dry sandwich... and substitute that for 'crossing-the-Sahara-dry-cottonmouth dry sandwich'). I wish ,if only, I could stop there. Alas, it was horrifyingly only the beginning of everything that was wrong with the experience. What can I say? Everything from toasting the over abundant slices of bread before they were assembled and fried on a grill as a whole sandwich, to the somehow missing the fact that one of the two sandwiches ordered (mine) was sans sauerkraut (I mean like zero amount of the canned cabbage was included on my sandwich), to the most egregious culinary violation of the evening, the Thousand Island dressing! Oh it had a pinkish colored condiment, all right. The best I could determine, mayo and ketchup (but not tasty like secret sauce à la McDonalds Big Mac.. a sandwich I found myself wishing I had ordered at that moment). Oh no. It was as blaise and bland and tasteless as a goopy substance could possibly be. Thousand Island? Uhh... no. Maybe the 1001st Island ? To think I even asked for more to help my aqua-challenged pallet! I sadly worked over the sans-wich with a faint glimmer of hope that I would cull at least something good from this culinary catastrophe. Reality set in. This was no Rubin. It was no sandwich at all. It was a $25 (x2) heist from my wallet. For real. I'd been heisted and nothing would undo this experience. The real kicker:
My own brother, not only recommended THIS sandwich from THIS establishment a few months ago, he went so far as to say, 'the best Rubin in town.' Really? No not really. For real. Apparently Yaleys (the owner reputedly attended the posh Ivy League college) know nothing of preparing proper Irish fare. This menu item doesn't even warrant a 1 star out of 5. Zero stars for the arid anomaly. I'll keep my overall rating at 3 stars for the dining experience; keep in mind, the restaurant was a 5 star experience back in the day (of taste and hydration).
The Irish have, not only suffered potato famine, but now sandwich hydration-drought. read more