I had to stop into North Liberty one day late last summer to drop some garden produce off for my step-daughter that she was going to can for us. I was on my way to Minneapolis and I was heading out of town going toward Interstate 380 and I noticed a restaurant on the left that I hadn't noticed before - a place called Tin Roost. It looked sort of nice and I almost stopped to go in and check the place out, but I carried on toward the Twin Cities. However, on a fall Sunday when my wife and I stopped into see her daughter, we decided to head to Tin Roost and have lunch before we headed back home to the Quad Cities.
Quite actually, the first time I went by the place, I'm not certain the place was fully open - if it were open at all. It had a soft opening in late August of last year and is run by managing partner Joe Selix. Selix had worked for Eric Schewmaker and Brian Flynn - the co-owners of Blackstone in Iowa City - as the restaurant's front-of-house manager. (Both Flynn and Schewmaker also co-own of 30hop in Coralville. Click here to see the Road Tips review on that place. Flynn is also an owner of a handful of places around Iowa City including Joe's Place, PiZan, and Donnelly's Pub.) Selix moved out to Colorado to work in restaurants there for a couple years, but when Schewmaker and Flynn - along with Brandon Pratt - wanted to open their new restaurant in North Liberty, they convinced Selix to move back to the area to partner with them. The partnership was also able to get a former Iowa City chef - Jeff Sills, formerly of Taste on Melrose - to come back to the area from his gig as a chef in Chicago to head up the kitchen.
The group was going to initially call the place Tin Rooster, but there was a restaurant in either Texas or in New York - or both (I've read articles that said either place) - that had the same name. Taking the "er" off the name, but keeping the rooster logo, Tin Roost had full opening in September of last fall.
Tin Roost is located along W. Penn St. at Community Drive a little less than a mile east of the I-380 interchange. (see map) Once we got in and asked our hostess how long they had been open, we quickly realized that we would be breaking our long-standing rule of not visiting a new restaurant within the first 90 days of its opening. (Most problems and hiccups happen at a restaurant in the first three months. We prefer to let those kinks get worked out on others.) But this time, we just sort of shrugged our shoulders and followed the hostess to our seats.
The restaurant was open and spacious and very well lit from skylights and large windows. The ceilings were high and the floors were made of concrete. While there weren't a lot of people in there that day, we could tell that the place could probably get a little loud.
There were a couple of rooms off the bar area that functioned as an over-flow dining room as well as a small room that could be used for small group dining or meetings. The sign at the front door said that the restaurant could accommodate up to 500 diners.
The bar area featured a half-circle bar in the middle with tables and booths nearby. A large number of beers were on tap and a large flat screen television hung over the tappers. A corrugated metal facing covered the front of the underside of the bar giving it a bit of a modern rustic look. A circular air duct hung around the perimeter of the bar area.
The outdoor patio/beer garden was rather impressive. It featured a fire pit along with a number of heating lamps on the deck. Tin Roost is close to a bike path and they have made the beer garden bicyclist friendly for those looking for a place to take a rest. It was a tad chilly that particular day and we only saw one couple on the patio while we were there.
As we were looking over the food menu, our server Ashley came over to ask if we needed anything to drink. She provided a beer menu for us to look over and I found that they had my favorite beer on tap at Tin Roost - Kona Big Wave Golden Ale. I immediately like any place that serves Big Wave either on tap or in bottles. My wife got a glass of the house pinot grigio.
The menu is decidedly Americana-based with a dose of Southern cuisine mixed in. It was a pretty short menu, which was OK in my book. They had appetizers and sharable plates, small bowl selections such as mac & cheese, shrimp and grits, and chicken pot pie, and a handful of entrees including a pork chop, corn crusted catfish, and a rotisserie chicken.
They had a number of salads on the menu and my wife went with the full kale salad. For $5 more, she got grilled salmon with it. The only problem was that they forgot the grilled salmon on the salad. My wife waited patiently while they grilled up a chunk of salmon for her to put on the place. We wrote it off to growing pains for the restaurant since it had only been open for about 45 days.
Once the salmon did show up, this is what the finished product looked like. Apple slices, peanuts and a lemon vinaigrette were tossed in with the kale. But the kale leafs were large and not chopped. My wife was having a bit of trouble navigating through the salad having to cut the kale while trying not to knock anything off the plate. Even though she liked what she had, she felt that the value was pretty poor. "$10 dollars for a plate this size for this amount of unchopped kale and some apple slices is too much," she said. But she felt for the extra five bucks for the salmon helped make up the disparity.
I really didn't know what to get on my initial visit to Tin Roost. I thought about the crispy chicken sandwich, as well as the Flat Iron steak sandwich. But I ended up going with the standard cheeseburger - a half-pound beef patty topped with Milton Creamery white cheddar cheese, bread and butter pickles, lettuce and tomato. A side of fries came with the burger.
The burger was actually very good. The cheddar cheese had a great forward taste, but didn't overpower the taste of the beef in the burger. The veggie toppings were fine with the burger, as well. The bun was lightly toasted, light, spongy and held together with the very juicy and tasty burger. I was more than happy by ordering the burger at Tin Roost.
Still, on our first visit, the service was a little choppy. They forgot the lemon wedges my wife had ordered. I had ordered a second beer and it didn't show up until I was almost done with my burger. And it took forever for our server to come back with my credit card after I gave it to her to pay our bill. Once again, we chalked it up to growing pains in a new restaurant - one of the reasons why we have a 90 day rule before we like to go to new restaurants.
We've since been back to Tin Roost just before Christmas and the service has gotten much better. We had a young man who waited on our party of four that evening who was on top of his game. The menu was still condensed as it was on our first visit, but we were told that they were going to be adding some items after the first of the year. And they were in the process of putting up acoustic panels to dampen down the loudness in the dining rooms. Tin Roost is a nice place to get a drink and a basic meal. It's open and airy, but comfortable enough where you'll want to linger after a meal.
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