Local Review: Floyd’s Place

A dancing pig and cow. Should be good, right?

If you’ve ever been down to Seattle Center, you’ve probably noticed Floyd’s Place. It’s the sports pub and barbecue with a pig and cow doing the do-si-do out front.  It simply has to be good, right?

I finally got my chance to find out.

A rainy Sunday, an important football game on the TV, and nothing but time on my hands. Does it get any better? Everything about the experience was perfect except for one thing: Everything.

Where do I start?   How about the clot of repugnant jackasses crowding the doorway while they chainsmoke, so one can get a good noseful of nausea before stepping inside?  Hey Floyd, you might want to get yourself one of these: http://farm1.static.flickr.com/54/146786168_d8b06af34b.jpg 

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m no stranger to sports bars.  I like a good rowdy crowd. I’m strongly in favor of yelling at the TV, and in fact, I named my fantasy football league “Yell at the TV” in honor of such things.  I even have a certain amount of tolerance for ugly drunks, as long as they don’t get REALLY close to me when speaking.    Oy, I hate that.

But Floyd’s might want to check their liquor control board guidelines on when to cut people off.  By halftime, I was drowning in bad breath and earsplitting voices, and decided to move to a different table. One drunken woman was so shrill, I think she shattered the ice in my Diet Coke.  And the bar was maybe only half full.  I shudder to think how unpleasant that place must be when it’s full.

Let’s get to what’s important: The barbecue.  I ordered the happy hour special, which was slow cooked, barbecue brisket sliders.  Who cares about atmosphere?  I was excited for good barbecue.

The sliders looked fantastic.  The thin-sliced brisket was sliding out from the sides of those miniature white buns.  It smelled great, and the sauce had a really nice dark, molasses look about it.  The curb appeal was excellent. Unfortunately, I decided to eat it.

The meat was cooked well enough. But imagine Chinese-style sweet and sour sauce, loaded up with a Costco-sized batch of chili powder, and that’s what they seemed to be using for barbecue sauce.   Rather than sweet meets spicy, it was more like artificial maple syrup meets a tongue piercing.

I kept re-sampling the sauce hoping it would get better, and I just laughed.   But the joke was on me.  The spiciness wouldn’t let go, and it took a large beer and three glasses of ice water to shake the unpleasant burn.  Granted, I’m not a huge fan of spicy barbecue.  But I still can tell good spicy from bad spicy.  My food-loving friends who enjoy a hot barbecue probably would’ve hated the sliders even more than me.

Assuming that Floyd’s cares – which given the horrible service, I’m not so sure – they need to put more flavor and less heat in their sauce.  And they should probably use less of it, too.  I think under the glaze of horror, there was some pretty good brisket.

So, lesson learned: Floyd’s Place is just plain bad. What a waste of space.