When you walk in, you really don't expect Roasters to be this good. The place has the look & vibe of a bar that hasn't been touched since the Clinton administration. It's clean, mind you, but Roasters reminds me of the family restaurants I would go to growing up, the kind of restaurant that serves passable food and gets by because, well, it's there and you have to eat something.
While Roasters embodies some of that aesthetic (America's quintessential meat & potatoes band, Foo Fighters, were on the radio when I sat down, after all), serving basic down-home dishes that don't try to re-invent the wheel, and doing so at affordable prices, it mostly rises above when it comes to the food. Given both cornbread and a roll when I sat down, I could tell from the shimmering reflection I was going to like the roll, and I did. I'm always a tough customer with cornbread, though. Theirs was... great. It's a rare occurrence where I wanted more cornbread. Well done!
Chicken fingers get a lot of the accolades at Roasters, and they mostly live up to the hype. A platter gets you 5 moderately sized pieces, and they are both juicy and delightfully breaded. The flavor isn't anything you're gonna write home to Mama and Papa Yelp about, but it's enough. Dip 'em in the excellent honey mustard (another rarity for me is deeming any honey mustard good enough for my chicken, but Roasters' honey mustard is perfectly balanced), which is better than the thick BBQ sauce, and enjoy. The french fries could best be described as, "these are french fries that I do not hate". They cleared the bar without going far beyond. A special for the day was jalapeno mac & cheese, so naturally I asked them to shovel that down my gullet as quickly as possible, and it was a pretty solid offering.
Again, there's nothing I've had at Roasters (yet) which will make me mention them in discussions of the best X or favorite Y in the city, but pretty much everything I had there was satisfying, and at the end of the day, that's what you're looking for. Chasing down inventive and challenging menu items can be fun, but it can get exhausting as well, and it's nice to know there's something simple and tasty like Roasters when I just want food that, when I'm done, will leave enough grease on my plate to blind another patrons. It's hard not to feel at home at Roasters, what with the great service and, most importantly, the presence of White Zombie's "Thunder Kiss '65" on the radio as I gulped down some delicious sweet tea. Good stuff. read more