Out in the Washington D.C. area for a trade show this past fall, the trade show was poorly attended and I was just wasting time hanging out there. I thought that I could steal away for an hour or so and no one would miss me, so I looked for a craft beer place in the area. Although it was about a 10 minute drive from the place where the trade show was going on, I took off to go to a place called Brews & Barrels for a bite to eat and a couple beers for lunch.
It turns out that the group that owns Brews & Barrels are the same people which owns a couple other restaurants I visited in the Rockville/Gaithersburg area - Royal Tandoor (click here to see the entry on Royal Tandoor), and Creek Lodge Bar & Grill (look for an upcoming Road Tips entry on that restaurant). I had not known that the restaurants were tied together until well after I had come back from Washington D.C. Brews & Barrels opened in February 2020, but a month later had to shut down due to COVID 19 restrictions that were put in place across Maryland. When restrictions were lifted a few weeks later, it became a popular destination for craft beer and bourbon whiskey connoisseurs. Brews & Barrels is not affiliated with other places around the U.S. that are known as Barrels and Brews liquor stores in Tennessee and Arkansas, or Barrel and Bru in Edwardsville, IL.
The restaurant is located in the Kentlands Market Square, a shopping/dining/entertainment destination in the "New-Urbanism" planned neighborhood of the Kentlands in Gaithersburg. (see map) This was the first location of Barrels & Brews to open with Neel Kamal as the managing partner. A second Barrels & Brews opened in the Baltimore suburb of Owings Mills in late 2022, but abruptly closed in May of 2023.
I pulled into the parking lot next to Brews & Barrels around 1:30 one afternoon. There was ample parking off to the side of the restaurant and I parked next to a lady who had an Iowa Hawkeyes license plate holder. I startled her when I said, "Go Hawks!" as she was getting ready to get into her car. But she told me that she was an Iowa grad and played field hockey for Iowa in the late 90's, early 2000's.
As I got inside the door at Brews & Barrels, there was a large group waiting to get a table. I heard someone say, "Don't climb on the bear, please," and I wondered what that was all about. As I turned the corner into the dining area, there was a large stuffed brown bear in the corner and a couple young kids were enamored with it. I thought there was a line to get in, but one of the ladies in the group told me that they were preparing a large table for them.
The main dining room featured a two-sided bar with multiple flatscreens, wooden floor and reclaimed barn board walls. A large sprocket chandelier with Edison lighting hung from the center of the room. There were numerous high-top tables in the room with seating for either 4 or 6 people per table.
Around the corner from the main dining area was a small dining room with some booths, some smaller tables and an alcove with banquette seating underneath a wall with circular wood cuts from trees. The place was sort of rustic and had a backwoods motif. Not certain what they were trying for in their decor at Brews & Barrels.
I ended up seated at the bar and the bartender that day - well, I'm not going to give out his name because he was worthless. He was much more interested in his phone and his body language pretty much told me that he didn't want to be there that day. A co-worker had come in and sat a couple chairs from me and they had a spirited conversation about all that was wrong for working at Brews & Barrels. I understand that not all jobs are great, but to carry on about working conditions at the restaurant they're working at - in front of paying customers - isn't a good practice.
I was finally able to get a "What's up?" out of the bartender as I asked him for a food menu. He asked me what I'd like to drink and I found that their craft beer selection was pretty light. I thought that was odd for a place that has the name "Brews & Barrels". The selection of Scotch and Japanese whiskies and Kentucky bourbons they had to offer seemed less than impressive, and they had - maybe - 9 or 10 craft beers to choose from on tap. I asked him to pour me a Lone Oak Farms Haystack hazy IPA. The beer tasted sort of flat and was pretty underwhelming in flavor.
The lunch menu is substantially smaller than the dinner menu at Brews & Barrels. For one, they didn't offer any appetizers on the lunch menu, while the dinner menu had a number of sharable starters such as grilled Brussels sprouts, chicken wings, mozzarella sticks and Swedish meatballs. It's just a handful of sandwiches, a couple burgers and a couple wraps on the lunch menu whereas the dinner menu features entrees such as braised short ribs served over mashed potatoes, grilled salmon, pasta dishes, barbecued meats and flatbread pizzas.
Since I didn't have much to choose from between five sandwiches, two different types of wraps, or a lone burger selection, it was down to either the reuben sandwich or the steak sandwich. I did a mental coin flip in my head and I ended up getting the steak sandwich. And that was mainly because of the description on the menu.
The menu stated under the steak sandwich, "There are sandwiches...then there are sandwiches. THEN there are SANDWICHES. This is the latter." It featured chunks of mystery steak (they never indicated what kind of steak it was) along with sliced red onions, tomato slices, lettuce, yellow mustard, and a garlic aioli served on toasted rye bread. The steak sandwich was completely unimpressive and was totally oversold on the menu. The steak chunks were chewy and I expected much more out of what was supposed to be their signature sandwich. The sandwich came with fries that were equally "just OK" that were served in a little basket. Usually, I would have stuck around to have another beer. But I just decided to cut my losses and get back to the trade show for the rest of the day.
For a place with the name of Brews & Barrels you would think they would have a better selection of craft beers and an impressive selection of liquors and whiskies to choose from. But neither was true about the place. The food was average - at best - and not the experience the menu promised I would have when ordering the steak sandwich. And the service was downright deplorable and helped solidify my opinion that this was just a bad dining episode all around. Too bad for Brews & Barrels that I was completely turned off by the food, flat tasting beer and the worker's attitude during my visit. And that's sort of sad because the other places that were under the same ownership that I visited during my trip out to Washington D.C. (of which I didn't know about until much later) were actually very good. But Brews & Barrels was not.
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