Manayunk Brewery unimpressive

By Nate Adams
Collegian Editor
April 9, 2008

Over the weekend, I was cruelly ripped from my world of bright, hopeful youth and thrust into the cold, dark world of mortgages, receding hairlines and midlife crises.

That’s right people, I turned 22.

Thankfully, my delightful parents Tony and Evelyn decided to come down from Rochester, NY and make sure that I didn’t leap into the river, now that my best years are behind me and all.

Offering to buy me dinner at any place in the city, I chose to eat my first meal as an old man at the Manayunk Brewery, located on Main Street in Manayunk. And while I had a pretty good meal, I can’t help but think I wasted my pick.

Despite making reservations at the place, we still had to wait about 15 minutes to get our table, which was located on an enclosed deck right next to the river. I could see that being a real nice place to get dinner in about a month.

The Brewery is the definition of trendy. Featuring a beer list almost exclusively made up of in-house microbrews, the drink list is a playground for the upwardly-mobile, yuppie post-grad, which is what most of the restaurant was composed of that evening. Thank goodness I wore a sweater.

The first course consisted of some crab dip and the brewery’s own in-house lager. The dip was pretty good, yielding a good balance of melted cheese and shellfish. I would have liked some more crackers to spread the stuff on, but that’s just nitpicking. The appetizer was good.

So was the lager, I guess, but what self-respecting restaurant in town doesn’t carry Yuengling?

For the main course, I had myself a cheesesteak pizza. My understanding of food math is this: pizza = one of the most filling meals around. The same can be said of cheesesteaks. So, logically, if one were to combine the two, it would be one of the most stuffing meals of all time.

 

I must not have carried the one, because the cheesesteak pizza I ordered, described as “famous” on the menu, would have left me high and unfulfilled if not for the crab dip. Now, it’s very possible that I’m just a fat kid, and this portion would fill up the average person.

Because it was my birthday, and I was spiraling out of my younger days, I had some cheesecake for desert. It was good, but it’s pretty hard to mess up cheesecake, and for $5.25, I kind of expected it to do a little dance for me.

It’s the price of the place, at the end of the day, that keeps me from recommending the Manayunk Brewery to the average Joe and Jane college student. Between the three of us, our meal totaled at over $100. This is all well and good when the folks are footing the bill, but for couch-divers like you and I, this is madness.

The Manayunk Brewery is a nice place with pretty good food, but as I left the restaurant and braced myself for a bad back and a divorce, I couldn’t help feeling that I was paying for atmosphere over food, and all I wanted was a good meal. After all, I’m not a young man anymore.

adamsn1@lasalle.edu