Beneluxx

(My camera hates darkness. Sorry for the cruddy shots.)

Popped into Beneluxx, the new wine, beer, cheese, and chocolate-tasting restaurant located down the stairs on 3^rd Street this past weekend. Remember SoMa and A Bar Named Sue? That’s where Beneluxx is located.

The gist of Beneluxx is that you can sample wine, beer, cheese, and chocolate by the ounce –fifty wines, thirty beers, thirty cheeses, and twenty chocolates. Fondue, mini pizzas, sandwiches, sausages wrapped in galette, soups, and salads are offered, too. Fun!

Skreeeeeeeech! (Needle on vinyl.)

Before I start my long rant (it's always the whiners that write long reviews), let me say that nothing we put in our mouths from Beneluxx was bad and everyone working there was amiable. I write this with the utmost love for Beneluxx, and I hope someone will tell them to read this review. (I looked for a comment card, but there wasn’t one.)

When sitting down at the tables equipped with glass-rinsing systems (fun when drunk!) lining the wall across from the bar, the first thing you notice are bottles of bleach solution attached to the wall between EVERY table. The small sign below the bottles recommends that cautious individuals use the bleach solution to spritz surfaces. This. Is. Fucking. Weird. Is the owner O.C.D.! Any germaphobe is already packing Purell and antibacterial wipes. Take these bottles down at once. Weird. Weird. Weird.

The menu! Oh, god. Where do I start? Um…if you have to warn your customers that the menu is a novel when handing it to them, you might want to rethink it. The menu is horribly organized; it took us a good fifteen minutes to decide on the first drink order. It didn’t help that not a single one of our three menus included the same pages (some missing, some in different order).

My partner actually designs how people use information, and he tells me that the “information hierarchy” is poorly designed on Beneluxx’s menu. I dig holes in the dirt for a living, and I could tell that this menu was poorly designed. We spent a lot of time flipping back and forth between pages that logically and visually didn’t relate to each other.

The pairing suggestions were unhelpful. Listing five wines (nothing specific; just Zinfandel, Merlot, Reisling…) next to each cheese is like telling me to throw a dart. Towards the back there were two more pages with pairing suggestions (redundant!) for a select few cheeses, beer, chocolate, and wine. Just an example: all but one of the cheese and wine suggestions were for goat cheese. I like goat cheese, but, if you don’t, you’re screwed.

I’m not a professional information architect, but may I suggest handing me three pages only...

Page One

• Side One - White wine organized from light to heavy.
• Side Two - Red wine organized from light to heavy.

Page Two

• Side One - Cheese organized by texture.
• Side two - Chocolate grouped into white, milk, semi-sweet, and bitter-sweet.

Page Three

• Side One - Beer. I’m not a beer drinker, so have no suggestion for organization, but alphabetical wasn't working for the beer drinkers in my group.
• Side Two - Other food menu items.

Can’t fit it all? Yes, you can! Pare down the descriptions to essential words. Get rid of those unhelpful suggestions, and rely on the in-house experts. Intensively train your staff, so they are also knowledgeable. The staff was nice, and I could tell the non-expert staff was making an effort to learn. I know you’ve only been open a couple of weeks, but their knowledge will come in time.

Beneluxx, please hire a professional to design your menu. If you did already, fire them. Every day you have a customer struggle with the menu like we did, is a day you lose customers.Ok, I’ll keep this short…

Go ahead and sample all of the beers at Beneluxx. At around sixty cents per ounce, it’s not expensive to sample all thirty. Yes, it's more expensive than buying a few beers, but.... One ounce of beer is about two small sips – not much – but it’s fun to sample and compare. Plus, you can depress the glass washer to your delight.

Sampling all the wines will put a dent in your pocket. Sample a few, and settle on one or two for the rest of the evening.

Sample as many cheeses as your colon can handle. One ounce of cheese (you can order more than one ounce of any item, but we stuck with one ounce for everything) is perfect for sampling, and the prices are not outrageous. I went with three goudas – goat, cow, and sheep’s milk – for comparative eating. My partners went with two different cheeses each. We all shared like good kids.

I can’t believe I’m about to say this, but one ounce of chocolate is a bit much if you’re sampling a few different kinds. Half of this plate went into my bag and was eaten for breakfast the next day. I found the chocolate sampling the most interesting. There was even a chocolate that – gasp – I didn’t like. It tasted like beer!!

Hungry, we tried a few items from the food menu. The traditional Swiss fondue came in a tiny ramekin with bread. Additional accompaniments can be ordered for a charge. We went with the apples. There was barely enough cheese for the bread and apples, so I wonder what happens if you order more than one accompaniment?

All of Beneluxx’s mini-pizzas include meat. The Iberian, with chorizo, La Peral Blue Cheese, port Dijon cream, Spanish onions and peppers was the most interesting, so all three of us vegetarians forwent the chorizo. This pizza was flavor-packed with salty, pungent blue cheese, caramelized onions, and sweet port Dijon cream. A winner!

Sampling by the ounce is always more expensive than going whole hog, but look at it as a learning experience. Food was good, sampling was fun, but getting there was painful. Hopefully, Beneluxx fixes the menu train wreck, and gets on with gettin’ on.

Beneluxx, 33 S. 3rd St., Philadelphia, PA, 19106 Tues.-Thurs., 5p.m.-midnight; Fri. and Sat., 5p.m.-2a.m.; Sun. and Mon., closed.

Monk's Cafe

Beer. I hate beer. I’ll drink anything else alcoholic – except a Bloody Mary, because tomato soup should be eaten from a bowl with a spoon. So, how did I end up at Monk's Cafe, a Belgian gastropub in Center City that prides itself on its extensive beer list?

In short, I was hungry and turning into a monster, so ducked into the first place I saw that had something on the menu I could eat. Without a snack or a little nibble every three hours, I become irritable and emotional - even to the point of crying. So, into Monk’s we go.

Stepping into the dark, dirty (more on that later) bar atmosphere of Monks on a beautiful, sunny afternoon for lunch just didn’t feel right. Maybe if I were an alcoholic that spent my days recuperating and recharging in the low light of bars, Monk’s would have felt like a warm, friendly blanket. Or maybe if it were cold and overcast outside, so the transition would have been less drastic. No matter, I was just happy to be minutes away from eating.

Seated in the nook across from the bar, we look at the paper drink menus on the table, only these paper menus look like they’d been trampled on the floor at a concert. These drink menus were dirty waaay beyond a few splatters of beer. Should I touch this? Does Monk’s not have the money to go to Kinkos?

On the food menu (not nearly as dirty, but still in need of replacement) they’ve got your standard vegetarian pub offerings: basic salad, French fries, portabella sandwich, and a veggie burger. They’ve also got a vegan burger, a vegan tempeh sandwich, and vegan portabella “lasagna.” It was these last items on the menu that got me in the door, not because I necessarily wanted to order them, but I thought that since these items were present, Monk’s at least aims to please vegetarians and vegans.

Hmm…veggie burger or portabella burger? I rarely (ha) see these on menus, so was torn. I went with the veggie burger. Monks has lots of paired toppings to choose for your burgers, though. Do I want the Abbot with Boursin and sprouts, the Antwerp with Sottocenare truffle cheese and shitake mushrooms, or one of the other seven (not all vegetarian) specialty burgers?

I went for the Monk’s veggie burger with caramelized leeks and blue cheese. Sounds good, right? Imagine hot, sweet, caramelized onions and tangy blue cheese on the top a warm burger – kinda like this visual here.

I was fully expecting the flat, perfectly round veggie burger you get from the freezer section, so there was no surprise there. I didn’t expect a burned veggie burger – it’s not meat, you barely have to heat the thing. I also wasn’t expecting cold leeks that looked like someone pressed firmly onto the burger, and tasted like, well, nothing. That blob of blue cheese was insulting. I drenched my burger in the spicy sauce that came with the fries to add flavor that the leeks and blue cheese should have contributed, but didn’t. The bun was good, but they get those from a local bakery.

My partner ordered the vegan tempeh sandwich on whole wheat bread. The sliced sandwich bread could not stand up to the heft of the smoky tempeh, tomatoes, and few leaves of lettuce. The sandwich had to be secured by two hands pinching all sides to keep the contents from falling out, and the bread from flopping. This sandwich needed a heftier bread. As one who takes a sandwich to work almost everyday, I don’t ever care to see sliced bread when dining out, and would have asked for a substitution, but…this was not my sandwich.

The side of Belgian fries was limp and greasy. Aren’t Belgian fries supposed to be crisp because they’ve been fried twice? Also, every single fry was no longer than an inch or so, and many were mere nubbins. These fries were only suitable for drunks who didn’t care what greasy carb they threw down their gullet – with a fork, off course, because they were too tiny to hold.

After our dissapointing meal, I was at least filled with food and back to my normal self. I was able to focus on other things than filling my belly, so turned my focus to the interior of Monk’s. The small windows beside me were covered in torn plastic, and the window sills were covered in dust. The walls were splashed with all sorts of food and there were twelve or so gnats perched on the wall about three feet above our table. I expect dirty walls and general filth at concert halls and dive bars, but Monk’s serves food! Ick.

Monk’s cares enough to get us vegetarians and vegans in the door, and oblige us with something to gnaw on, but they don’t care to actually give us something of any worth. I will only be back to Monk’s if I’m dragged there by beer-drinking friends, and then only to drink. There are much cleaner Belgian gastropubs in Philly that serve better veggie food. And, please, hire a cleaning crew, and send someone to Kinkos.

Monk's Cafe, 264 S. 16th St., Philadelphia, PA, 19102
215-545-7005
Mon.-Sat., 11:30 a.m. - 1 p.m.; Sun. brunch, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m; Sun. dinner, 5 p.m. - 1 a.m.