Wanting to try something new, Sauce and I were kicking around Ideas and Hobnob Grille came up. Checked out the menu, and thought what the hell, If it's bad we can always default to Victory or PokPok. Short answer, we stayed.
Now, a great measure of a place is French fries. Sounds dumb, but if they can get them cooked correctly, seasoned right, and maybe throw you a twist with the condiments, it bodes well for the rest of what the kitchen is cranking out. Fries here are hand cut, blanch fried then fried again on order. The achilles heel of them is their presentation. Served in a cone looks neat, but the end result is after your first say, 8 fries, the trapped steam in the bottom of the cone ends up making the whole thing limp. The salt was spot on, as were the curry ketchup, vinegared mayo and Aioli with some sort of spicy pepper.
Also ordered the Beet salad, Flat Iron steak and soup of the moment, which happened to be a potato/spinach. Beet salad with goat cheese and spicy whole grain mustard, a citrus of some sort(I wanna say clementines) and a really great Peppercress, was probably the overall winner. The steak is great too. Cooked perfectly(from this and the fries you get a sense that the chef and rest of the kitched really understand how everything should be cooked)and served with a jammy chutney and toast w/brie. To be honest, the potato soup was less than great. Kinda tasted like pureed baked potatoes with a little stock and cream added. Nothing exciting.
overall,I think this place is already a solid neighborhood joint. Only being open 3 weeks, when they hit their stride they could be a spot to seek out.
Thanks for the encouraging words. You got to a whole portion of fries before I did. Enirely my fault since I should know better than agreeing to use these - the metal rings have been garden ornaments for several days now. Good call too on the soup - I think we ran out of the chicken mulligatawny shortly before you arrived and it totally was a throw something together in the middle of dinner thing. Unfortunate since I think we probably do soup better than anything else. The guys in the kitchen appreciated reading this. Doing decent food is totally a team effort and it's refreshing to see someone recognize that.