For eleven months of the year Q is a tiny shitty desert town at the junction of an interstate and a US highway. Good place for low-tax fuel before entering California. Bad place for just about anything else.
In January the place becomes a town of around 100,000 with RV’s parked throughout the several square miles of desert around the town. I’m spending some time here and was looking for a decent beer place, a hang-out, a place to catch the game on TV.
Choices are few. The beer choices are what I call “Nebraska”: Bud, Bud Light, Coors, Coors Light. The Grubstake has an IPA which caught my eye, so I had a fish and chips lunch there. I’m about to slander a place doing business here in Q.
Read the Yelp reviews of this place. Any reviews sounding positive are fake.
The smell of the place is shocking. Reviews have mentioned this for years and I can’t understand why they haven’t found the source of it. Lots of bars smell bad, but the ambience, beer, and food are worth the annoyance.
The IPA was Mexican and I hadn’t heard of it. It was little unusual, an odd flavor. I ordered fish and chips while I sipped my beer. [Yes. I know. Ordering fish and chips in the desert is pretty stupid, but it’s their signature dish.] As I waited for my lunch the beer became odder, and the smell of the place was starting to get to me. No matter, this is an experiment, just a visit to check things out.
Service was OK, but I was the only one in the place. The owner was a control freak so no matter how many people there were, everything had to go through her. That explains the slow service reported by others.
The beer became very odd as I sipped.
The fish and chips was a surprise. The breaded fish was a good 9 inches long, maybe a foot. For what I was paying (less than $10) it didn’t connect. Once I tasted the breading I peeled it off the fish and discarded it. The fish was generic white stuff, pretty flavorless.
The fries were just your ordinary bagged frozen variety. The beer was tasting more odd, the smell of the place was getting to me. The cole slaw had no flavor, and I was about to ask for some tartar sauce when I noticed there was another cup of stuff on my plate that might have been meant as such. Not even close.
That beer just doesn’t taste good at all. And the smell of this place was getting crazy.
The beer was skunk, probably the remains of the keg left over the summer from last year.
I’ve been in some bad places with poor food, but this place seems to actually work at making things unpleasant. How else can you get everything wrong?
It’s a great experience, having a beer and lunch at the worst restaurant in the west. I paid my bill and got out of there quickly, but the smell of the place was on my body all night. Gawd is that place awful.
Avoid this place.