Exhibiting Pour Judgement and Liking It, in Newport, RI

We took today to make a Christmas season trip down to Newport Rhode Island to see how the original 1% lived back at the turn of the 20th Century.

My husband, son and I (no Dave on this trip)   traipsed through the famous summer "cottages" of the Vanderbilts and their ilk, The Breakers, Marble House, and The Elms.

Looking at all this opulence causes one to work up a mighty thirst. We were supposed to be headed to visit my parents over on Cape Cod after we were done here, but after skipping lunch all three of us were feeling that a meal would be better before the hour drive to grandma's.

We consulted Foursquare to see what was nearby to us. A huge list of foodrinkeries appeared, but one in particular caught my eye.  Pour Judgement.


How very funny, I laughed, and told Doug that we totally had to go there. Punched the address into the GPS and in a few minutes there we were.

We got there a little on the early for a Saturday night thing, took a table by the window next to the chalkboard.

Our waitress Jess sidled up quickly to serve. We had read on the way over that people on Foursquare highly recommended their Beer and Burger combo, so we figured that'd be the way to go.

But first, beer.

Doug started with the Harpoon Czech Harvest and I got the Pretty Things Jack D'Or. I always try and get Pretty Things products when I'm out and their beer is available -- I like Dann and Martha, and their philosophy as I've gotten to know them through reading about them online. Jack D'Or never disappoints but the Czech Harvest was bliss.

We ordered onion rings and wings to start, but the wings had a little bit of a twist. We didn't go to Buffalo, but Chinese style with General Tsao wings.

Waitress Jess was psyched and informed us "you can't go wrong" with that.

She was right. Coated with that delicious sweet, spicy goo that you get when you order General Tsao, Gao, Tzao or whatever spelling you want to use, the wings were fantastic.



Perfectly cooked, and flat out delicious.

The wings were a little difficult to handle with fingers even after waiting for a while, because that sweet coating is like hot melted sugar lava.

Doug asked me why we've NEVER seen General Tsao wings anywhere else on the planet, that we had to accidentally tourist  ourselves up into a plate of them after gawking at the homes of the richie riches and Titans of Industry from days gone by.

All I could do was shrug my shoulders and lick my fingers.

We managed to get through the plate, of course. The onion rings were good too. Perfectly breaded and fried. And our burgers all arrived just as we were finishing our appies. 

For our second round of beer, I had the Cisco Whale's Tale Pale Ale, and Doug had the Heavy Seas Winter Storm.  

I had ordered my burger with bleu cheese and bacon, harkening back to my recent trip to Cleveland where my friend Bill was sorely disappointed with the "slice" of weird bleu cheese that he got on his. 

This burger was more along the lines of what Bill would have expected, for sure. A huge mound of bleu cheese sat atop the burger... and my only thought about what would make it better is I  usually like it when they broil the bleu cheese a bit and get it more melty. Taste wise, there was no problem. It was all just right. The fries were crisp and crunchy, and perfect. The burgers had a nice seasoning mix inside them, I could see bits of red pepper mixed in. They gave me so much bacon that I ended up eating two strips of that glorious and unstoppably wonderful stuff after I finished the burger.

Josh, one of the guys who works at the bar, came round the corner a couple of times and we talked about the history of the bar (my good friend Jess used to frequent Newport and she didn't recognize the name), good beers, other places in Rhode Island with lots of craft beers on tap and other various and sundry things. I told him and awesome waitress Jess about the beer blog here... 

If they're visiting, I hope they say hi in the comments. 

I told them that we picked that destination simply based on the name and nothing else. So whoever made the decision to call it Pour Judgement gets a big thumbs up from us. There were dozens of places we could have it, but our undying love of the punny brought us to their door, with very satisfactory results.

After spending time in the giant mansions where the three rooms I liked the best were the kitchens in each of them, it was nice to be among "normal" people. People who wouldn't be living at The Breakers, but would be living in town doing normal life things.

I have a lot of thoughts to process about the lives and stories I was exposed to in the homes of the Gilded Age, but will save that for another day.