Wanted a semi-fancy dinner without much of a wait last night so we tried BrickTop's for the first time. Had a little snafu with reservations (opentable doesn't have it listed directly from the app but you can get to it from the bricktops website) so we just walked in. We were quoted a 30 - 40 min wait, went out to the car, figured out the opentable situation, and made reservations for 5 min later. I never really understand this, when restaurants have online reservations available but give you a longer wait in person, but I imagine there is a reason so I'm not going to ding them for that.
The restaurant is very attractive, well decorated, and excellent lighting for some nice photos of you and your dining companions. It was very loud so not great if you want to talk.
I ordered a very expensive mocktail that was basically just fresh-squeezed juice. This was a fail. If I am going to pay top dollar for a mocktail, it needs to be something complex and special. On the plus side, the juice was very fresh and yummy,
We ordered the artichoke appetizer which was fantastic. 3 big grilled artichoke halves with aioli, but they also brough clarified butter on request. For dinner we had strip steak, filet, chicken milanese, and an order of the shagri-la sushi.
Steaks were big, well cooked, and overall yummy. The loaded potatoes were very large so the toppings didn't quite make it through the whole potato. Chicken milanese with fettucini was nice but very one-dimensional with an overwhelming flavor of butter from the beurre blanc. The parmesan and capers were not noticeable at all. It felt like a kids-meal dish.
The sushi was a bummer, but partly our fault. My daughter likes california rolls because she doesn't really like fish too much. She can handle "krab" with a k but not much else. Most people who like sushi also like fish, so it's hard to review this based on her taste. The biggest issue was that the Krab (maybe real crab) was blended into the cream cheese and it was a very heavy portion of crab that ended up making the filling much more fishy than you would usually get from a california roll. We knew the rolls would be topped with shrimp, salmon, and tuna, but we thought those would be whole pieces that could be picked off (and eaten by me), but they were very finely minced and really impossible to remove. The shrimp was incredibly fishy and tasted old and rubbery. It was just way too much fishiness for her to handle so we only ate 2 pieces and abandoned the rest. I like sushi and even I struggled with the heavy fishiness of this sushi.
Service was odd. Our interactions with our server were awkward, she struggled with answering some questions (like salad dressing options), she didn't offer bread until after we had our apps/salads, struggled to keep up with refills for my heavy-tea-drinking husband, and just overall didn't seem smooth or confident. Our food made it out but she was just not the best.
We would go back 100% for the artichokes if nothing else. I feel like BrickTops has a really nice appetizer list that would make it great for happy hour of more of a tapas kind of meal. read more