Ferndale Project

Ferndale Project is a real treat. Spacious, airy beer hall and pizza parlor combined, with coffee and pastries for the early risers. The Detroit-style pizza here is the real deal!

This is a very weird spot if you are solo and not intentionally attending some kind of event.

While it's a fairly open space with a lot of indoor picnic table seating, the tiny bar is not inviting, made further so by cramping it up with dish trays stacked sky high. Despite the register being two feet away, and my verbally asking if it was okay to sit at the bar, they offered no further explanation aside from an utter lack of service. They do, in fact, require you to stand up from your barstool and shuffle over a couple of steps to the tablet station to order your beer, all just to walk back over to your barstool, at the bar, right next to where you ordered, and marvel at their robotic demeanor as they lean back and recommence scrolling on their phone right in front of you. How they decided to make such a short bar in the first place, let alone install the sink right below the only seating area at the bar, is a feat in and of itself.

The taplist heavily features hazy IPAs, and despite such a strong focus, that's not actually their strong suit, unfortunately, because the three I had all tasted artificially flavored, like they had some Sunny D flavoring packets added to them. While the California common was quite tasty, it was a total oddball unlike any I've had before, featuring maris otter malt. The secondary chunk of the menu consists of fruited sours.

Of course I had to stand back up from the bar to place an order for food, even though the (three!) bartenders were washing dishes right in front of my face. During the 15 seconds it took doing so, someone attempted to take my barstool despite there being a half empty flight and a full mug of beer sitting right in front of it. Turns out I happened upon trivia night, on a Monday, with a deafeningly loud soundtrack accompanied by a crowd of people fighting over the right to bogart barstools for their friends who weren't actually present.

You're given a buzzer that informs you when you can retrieve your food from the almost entirely open kitchen, which is fine, but with all the tipping suggested upon each transaction for all of this self-service, they might as well default that thing to zero and make the taps full on self-serve while they're at it. The food itself was fine--the lamb burger was quite overdone, but its flavor profile, as well as the fries it came with, were tasty enough to make up for it.

Overall this is one of those disingenuously "welcoming" community hubs full of snobs dressed in modern green hair hippy costumes pretending like they're happy to work together and be around each other. In actuality, they're utterly crippled from even uttering a single word to the person next to them because they know their motives are selfish, and are too embarrassed to admit it.

Also, despite being in a fairly large building, the parking lot is tiny, and if there aren't other people already parked on the street and you're not familiar with the street paint in this neighborhood, it helps to know that those weird D-shaped spots are indeed for parallel parking your vehicle.