New Doherty's Ale House

I'd love to have a place like Doherty's in MA...a non pretentious place that serves lots of good beer & honest food in a comfortable environment that doesn't cater to the super beer geek. The antithesis of Boston-area places for the most part. Yes, I have been to the original Doherty's.

 

Yard House?

 

British Beer Company?

 

While I agree this is a good place for "non-geek" beer friends (think more of a local Yard House), they need some people that actually know beer. What good are all your taps when our server has to keep coming back to ask what we ordered because they had never heard of a Saison in their life? And there were other indicators tonight that this person had never even been a server before.

Although I had no expectations of this being a Sunset Tap or similar beer snob heaven bar, I wanted this to be a "gateway" taphouse for Rhode Island. Especially living only a mile away! Unfortunately athough the atmosphere and setup were great I was disappointed. Will give them another try after the kinks are worked out a little but not super optimistic, based on their judgment in personnel more than anything else.

 

Yuck. BBC food is Sysco nasty.

 

YardHouse is OK. I go to YH's more when I travel than to Dedham or Fenway...their happy hour deals are great in other states (damn MA laws).

 

Pretty stellar lineup. Quite excited to stop in.

 

FOOD: Good, not great. Had a beef on weck sandwich and some of my woman's bahn mi. Nothing spectacular but the price was real good ($10 for both, and they're fairly sizeable). The nachos I saw someone get were friggin huge, wish I got that instead. They also seem to use beer in a lot of the sauces they put with the apps and entrees, which is pretty cool. I noticed a Harpoon IPA cheese sauce for the philly and Harpoon UFO dip for the pretzels. There were more but I can't recall them.

ATMOSPHERE: Decent. It's a large place, they pack people in big time, but its pretty new so they'll have to get their feet wet over the next few months to truly make it feel like a cohesive restaurant experience. The servers seemed new so they weren't the best. Work in progress.

BEER: Real big list of beer, but no walezbro or anything too hard to get. The other Doherty's occasionally has things that are a little hard to find so I don't expect this one to miss out on the rare kegs that might come through either. The prices on the beer are awesome though. I saw some of the beers on this list also on tap at Julians and some of the beers at Doherty's were a few bucks cheaper. I had a Lagunitas Undercover Government Shutdown and a Uinta Hop Notch IPA, which is actually really good. Very fruity. Girlfriend had a Flower Power (super fresh and very good) and a Matilda, which was real good as well. The pint glasses are all beer-can shaped, which is cool. I liked those glasses.

I'd go back for sure in a few months to see if anything has improved. If not I may just stick to Pawtucket Doherty's since its closer