Judgement Day. The Road Warrior. Escape from LA. Electric Boogaloo. Pig in the City. All sequels of note. The Bentley Pub of Auburn Massachusetts also has a sequel, with the go to sequel title of Bentley Pub 2. Do I think they would be better served by giving it a flashy name, like “Bentley Pub 2: Come for the Grub” or “Bentley Pub 2: The Craw Fillinging”. I get it, you need to have a mind like a steel trap to come up with amazing restaurant names like those, creativity that could instead be put to use making some kick ass nachos. Could mind you, but sadly not.
When you go down to the pub, there are certain things you expect: Fish & Chips, Bangers & Mash, Toad in the Hole, Blood Pudding, fifth English joke name food, etc. But in all seriousness, you don’t walk into a “pub” expecting the Mona Lisa of food, unless said Mona Lisa is deep fried. If you go see an Adam Sandler movie, you know it’s not going to be an Oscar worthy performance and you have to judge it accordingly. “Sure Grown Ups wasn’t a good movie, but at least it wasn’t Grown Ups 2, AMIRITE?” That’s what I would say if I had seen either of those, but what I’m saying now is that if you go to a pub, you’re getting greasy sub-par nachos.
Oddly enough though, while the nachos were sub-par, they weren’t greasy, which was some serious points in their favor. No, what they were unfortunately were just really bland, which in many ways is even worse than a really bad order of nachos. What could have been a real mess of greasy nacho cheese and sweaty chips instead was a reach towards greatness: real melted cheese and diced tomatoes and green peppers show that this had potential to be more than what it was destined, but then there was the chicken. I had the choice between chili or chicken as a topping, and I took the lesser, and more fowl, of two traveled roads to receive the most meh chicken I’ve ever had. It was cooked fine, no problems there, but with no seasoning or anything to give it any flavor. It was as though I was eating little black holes of taste and it just decreased the overall profile of the dish across the board.
If these were truly terrible nachos I could rejoice in slamming them, but these aren’t terrible, they’re just meh. I can see the chili option being better as a pub chili is something I could get behind, but I cannot comment for certain on that having, you know, not tried them. Probably best just sticking to a Fish & Chips and a pint.
