Courthouse Grill

250 1st. Street
Hillsboro, Mo.

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The Place:

It had been a few weeks since our first visit to this new place, time to see if they’d settled in. We had a few minor issues then, the free-range seating, the fatty steaks, the ignored customers.  These are all things that are easily fixable.

It was still neat and attractive, the walls uncluttered though still a terrible shade of baby-sh&#! green. 

There were not as many patrons this time, which didn’t surprise me. On our last visit there was a truck/tractor event at the fairgrounds, this time, not. The average age of the diners in attendance skewed toward advanced middle age to full blown senior citizens. Most were in groups of four or more.

We stepped in and stood. I wanted to see what happened next. Last time someone just called out for us to sit anywhere. This time, not. One young lady grabbed some menus and pointed to a table near the door, pretty much where we were standing.  I think it was the same table as last time.

At the other end of the room, above and to the left of the bar, a single TV was on, tuned to GAC. That stands for ‘Great American Country’. ‘GAC’ is also the exact sound I repeatedly make when I have to watch it. If there’s anything worse in my mind than contemporary country music it’s contemporary country music videos. And the only thing worse than those in the music industry is NON-contemporary country music.  Don’t take me wrong though, I have nothing against people who like country music, unless I have to be around them for more than a few minutes. It’s simply a matter of taste. I have some, people who listen to that twangy noise do not.

Fortunately the volume was set pretty low, and if I hummed quietly to myself I could drown out the heart-cheatin’ hard-drinkin’ honky-tonkin’ ballads and anthems.

By taking off my glasses the videos might as well have been infomercials.

Our waitress introduced herself and we were ready to rock and roll.

The Food:

Hot Wings

The menu was pleasantly uncomplicated. Sandwiches, steaks, seafood/pasta and salads. All the items were defined simply,  without unnecessary flourish. No snooty ‘pungent Corinthian balsamic oils’ here.  Salads contain lettuce, not lacy, petit, exotic greens. Adam and his mother were debating appetizers. I rarely get involved in those discussions. They settled on boneless hot wings.

Our drink order was taken, Tea, Dr. Pepper, and Pepsi. As the drinks were delivered in licensed St. Louis Rams glasses, Becky took the appetizer order. I spent the intervening time not watching GAC. This is harder than it sounds. I changed my mind a few times as I looked through the menu. The Courthouse Grill names many of their sandwiches kitschy court-themed names like ‘The Defender’, ‘The Prosecutor’ and ‘The Judge.’ I initially wanted a BLT. However, they call their BLT  a BLT, no originality. So I settled on The Defender.

The Defender is a 6 oz. ribeye sandwich served on buttered Texas toast. I sided it with the shoestring fries, which is what you order if you want regular fries. Adam asked for the Frisco burger, which I’d considered until I saw that it had two big patties. That seemed a bit much to me. He also ordered the fries.

Angel went off the reservation. She blamed the spicy hot wings and settled on a ‘Courthouse’ salad. She asked for it to be topped with 4 oz. flat iron steak. Becky happily took the order and scurried off.

The 'salad'

The wings were indeed hot. Both Adam and Angel commented on the heat, they didn’t need to. The red faces and sniffling was all I needed to know that I’d made the right choice in not having any. I’ve yet to find a hot wing I like, anywhere.

The wait was not long, about right, Angel and Adam couldn’t finish the wings. Becky refilled drinks in a timely manner. GAC was still on TV. Yet another hunky cowboy was kicking up some dust with his rugged pickup truck as the skinny, bosomy blonde in painted on Daisy Dukes shakes her head in shame at his misbehavin’ ways.

The food arrived. The first thing we noticed was the enormity of Angel’s salad. It was enormous. Piled high and deep, there was at least a half pound of shredded bacon piled up on one side. There’s no way any reasonable nutrition law would allow this beast to be considered a salad. Surely there are standards for that sort of thing.

Frisco Burger

The sandwiches were simply gorgeous. Adam plucked the offending onions off of his, I piled mine high. I added a touch of A1 sauce to mine, Adam added a little ketchup to his. Angel slathered about a cup and a half of sickly sweet French dressing on her trough of food.

I rolled back the bun on my ribeye sandwich and checked for excess fat. It wasn’t as bad as Adam had the last time we were here, but it was still prominent. At least the steak was tender. The crispy Texas toast was perfect for it. The combination of buttered toast and fatty grilled steak had me harking back to my days on the cattle drives, just me and my horse and  Cookie, with his clattering chuck wagon. Yahoo!  (I don’t hark back often, but when I do it’s usually to a fictional event.)

The Defender

About halfway through his large burger, Adam gave up. Too much meat. Not just in size, the two patties was exactly the reason I didn’t order it myself. There was too much meat for the seasoning. Adam said that after a while it was pretty tasteless.  Ground beef really doesn’t have a strong flavor, and if too lightly seasoned, after a while it simply becomes a chewing exercise. My ribeye was somewhat of a physical workout as well, it required a little more pull and chew than I am accustomed to. It wasn’t bad, just a lot of work. Late into the feast someone switched the TV from GAC (Gack!) to the Mizzou/Alabama football game. This was an improvement, though only in the way that an hour in line at the DMV is an improvement over an hour and a half. I’m not a big football fan and my own alma mater doesn’t even have a football team… I don’t think, I’ll have to check on that.*

Summary:

The County Courthouse in Hillsboro.
That sign is actually for a law firm, but the
way this picture was framed it looks like it's
for the court, where serious felony walk-ins
are welcome.
The 'Boyer for Sheriff' sign is what I was actually
Trying to capture. I'm a big fan of the Sheriff.

It may sound like we didn’t enjoy it, but mostly we did. The Courthouse Grill is a great addition to the community. They’ve made some progress and established a customer base and the food is pretty good. Becky was a delight, she refilled us and checked on us frequently, always smiling, very polite. The service, specifically hers in this case, certainly won some points.

The tab came in at $44.62, tax included. Not real bad, but enough that I’d wished the food was just a smidgen better. This place is certainly of better quality and atmosphere than a fast food joint. The fact that it is locally owned is great, and like I said, the service was exceptional. I have a feeling that this place will do quite well.

 

The Courthouse Grill

250 1st Street
Hillsboro, Mo.

 We've been waiting for quite a while for this place to open up. We pass by this spot several times a week as it sits right in the middle of town. Finally this past week Angel and Adam saw people actually dining there.

I looked them up online to find out about hours, meal choices, etc. Nada. 

No web site, no Facebook page, nothing. Some of the auto-populating directories had a phone number and street address, and nothing else, so Friday night I called and was told the hours were Tuesday through Saturday 10 A.M until 10 P.M. Good enough.

The Place:

As I said we’d been watching. Weeks, maybe even a couple of months of construction. This appeared to be a complete renovation off the old building just of the main drag, across from the courthouse. It has its own designated parking area, a necessity being that close to the county court. Downtown parking is, like every other county seat, tricky during weekdays.

We parked and stepped right in, passing by the patio and the half dozen or so patrons seated there. Though the temperature was pleasant enough, the skies were clouding up and the breeze was a little gusty. That and the fact that we don’t especially like eating outdoors made the decision to dine inside rather easy.

We stepped in, the place was much bigger on the inside than any of us expected. There was plenty of available seating in the longer than wide dining area.  We glanced around and saw no obvious hostess, no one coming toward us. From the back a young lady finally emerged and advised us to sit anywhere we liked.

We picked a spot near the front, by the window. It afforded a view of the entire place.

The young lady handed us menus and wrote down our drink order, Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and unsweetened tea. 

About three minutes later another lady stopped by and offered to take our drink orders. We told her that it had already been taken and she asked by whom. “A younger lady” was all I could come up with and that didn’t help much since there were three or more younger lady waitresses scattered about. She said she’d figure it out.

The drinks did arrive, all in St. Louis Rams beer glasses.

St. Louis has a professional football team called the Rams. I don’t hear much about it since A. I’m not into football, and B. The Rams belong in Los Angeles as God intended. I blame the Arizona Cardinals football team for this mess. St. Louis is very much a baseball town, overwhelmingly so. Football, eh, not so much.

The place looked new. The mostly undecorated walls were painted a curious shade of light green that I can only describe as ‘pickle juice’. The only things on those walls were four or five beer signs, all touting  Anheuser-Busch-Inbev products, don’t get me started on that crime. In the back, over the bar was a large TV tuned in to a baseball game. Also over the bar there was one more AB/Inbev related neon sign.

The carpet was industrial and unnoticeably brown on lighter brown. The tables and chairs were noticeable, new, dark wood and modern.

All in all it was fresh, clean and modern. Sparse maybe, but not barren-sparse, more Scandinavian sparse.

The Food.

The menus were also fresh, clean and uncluttered, Burgers, sandwiches, specialties, seafood and steaks. Classic American cuisine.

Some of the burgers and sandwiches had court-related names like The Defender, The Judge and The Prosecutor. Cute. I was tempted by the simple BLT but decided to forgo my intuition and appetite and to instead try what I assumed to be a signature dish, the Courthouse Burger. They offered two different kinds of fries, shoestring and steak. My preference is somewhere in between, but I asked for the shoestring.

Adam asked for the Defender, a hand-cut ribeye steak served on grilled Texas toast. He asked for the steak fries, I was glad, I wanted to compare them against mine.

Cheese, bacon, mushrooms and grilled onions are considered options here. At one dollar per. I added cheddar cheese to mine and the waitress worked to up-sell the onions or mushrooms. I told her I might want the onions but the dollar would come out of her tip. She grinned and shrugged her shoulders, "Fine with me” she said.

Angel asked for the Gulf Shrimp Scampi and two sides, a baked potato and vegetables. Today’s veggie was ‘a medley’ according to the waitress, it sounded like Veg-All to me.

I noticed that the waitress wrote none of this down. As I’ve said before, this is a neat trick if you can pull it off 100% of the time, error free. Otherwise its just a stupid, pointless trick that is more nuisance than impressive. I’ve never been annoyed by a waitress writing down details of an order. I have been annoyed, more often than not, when they get something this simple, wrong.

The Defender

But we’d wait and see. And wait we did. The place was busy, busier than I could figure out a reason for it to be that busy. Hillsboro has a population of only sixteen hundred or so, and this was certainly a local-centric place being located behind the courthouse. It was Saturday evening, no court, no county business at all, even the nearby county jail wasn’t doing a booming business (yet). The patrons seemed local-like, no suits, mostly jeans and boots. Several young cowboy types including two rather large groups. Tight jeans, snakeskin boots, camouflage ball caps, Skoal rings in the hip pockets. I was trying to figure out what the draw to a brand new place was until one of the cowboys answered his country-music ring-toned phone. After the initial hello’s he said “We’re up here in Hillsboro.”

That told me a lot. He and his gang were not locals at all, they were in from the southern, more rural parts of the county, thus the ’up here in Hillsboro.’ I suspected there might be an event at the fairgrounds or something like that.*

I watched, waited, Adam and Angel poked at their phones.

Our drinks needed refills before the food ever arrived. The wait wasn’t terrible but it was noticeable. The waitresses appeared to be in a rush, dashing about more with  hurry than efficiency.  Several other patrons arrived and were told to sit wherever they liked. This would be a problem later. I’ll explain when I get to the sermon portion of this review.

Gulf Shrimp Scampi

The food did arrive, and it looked good. Filled plates, sizzling meat, melting cheese. I had enough grilled onions to choke a unicorn, they were piled high on the burger and falling off the sides. There was a pale tomato slice, some slightly wilted lettuce and an entire slice of raw onion on the side  The fries were not exactly what I would call ‘shoestring’ but they looked toasty and crispy. Also on the plate was a large dill wedge. The bun was obviously not a grocery store generic bun. I appreciated the touch. Adam’s Texas toast looked very good, and Angel’s plate certainly seemed colorful. The waitress stepped away quickly and I noticed as I was photographing the plates, Adam’s first, he’s the most impatient about that sort of thing, that his fries were the same size as mine. The waitress had gotten the order wrong, so much for the ‘I can remember all this without writing it down’ party trick. Fail.

Adam wasn’t too concerned about it so we didn’t ask for a correction.

We dug in after the waitress returned with some ketchup and cocktail sauce. She asked if I’d like mustard. Duh. It’s a burger. “Yes Please.” is how it actually came out of my mouth.

The burger was quite good, cheesy, smoky, just enough char. The fries were nice, but it kind of seemed they were pulled from the bottom of the bag, more ends and short pieces than whole strips.

The Courthouse burger

Adam struggled with his ribeye, pulling globs of chewy fat out of it, one glob about half the size of the steak.

Angel handed me a shrimp, I tried it. It seemed a bit overcooked, rubbery, but the taste was dead-on scampi.

I asked her about the veggies. They looked kind of pale, limp and lifeless to me, almost . . . “Frozen” Angel said, interrupting my train of thought. Yeah, that was it, they looked frozen.

Don’t take this all the wrong way, as far as food goes it was all pretty good. Not great, but good enough to go back for and maybe try something else. They’ve got good recipes, the tastes were there, with a little fine tuning and fresher/better quality ingredients the problems can all be fixed easily enough. But then there’s. . .

The Service:

First off, this place is brand new. I always cut some slack for new places as it takes time for the staff to find its rhythm and timing. So my sermon here should not be taken as harsh criticism, but rather as constructive comments since I want this place to do well. Hillsboro needs a place just like this.

I mentioned earlier the ‘seat yourself’ policy. Epic fail. (we debated over the modifier ‘epic’ and I won with this one bit of observation:

An elderly couple came in and found a seat, not too far from the front door. I’d noticed them out of the corner of my eye for no real reason other than they were taking up space in the corner of my eye. Nicely dressed, quiet, peaceful folk, not at all like the cowboys and their halter-topped lady friends.  Several minutes later, maybe ten or fifteen, I noticed movement in that same eye corner. It was the old couple leaving. I noticed their table had no plates, glasses or even menus. They’d gone completely unnoticed by the wait staff. That’s an epic fail.  Lost business, lost positive word of mouth. Ouch. I’m as laissez faire as the next guy, but this free-range seating policy means customers will slip through the cracks. It is actually counter-productive and counter-profit. The solution is simple. Either assign a hostess to seat people so they get immediate welcome and attention, or failing that, assign a floor supervisor/expediter whose primary job it is to keep an eye peeled on the entire dining area to look for things like impatience, empty glasses, etc. This is how every other restaurant in the world handles front-of-the-house service.  Someone needs to keep an eye open, a designated person, not just the waitresses, they’re busy enough with their own table issues. Someone like, I don’t know, maybe the lady behind the bar that watched the couple leave. She noticed them as they left, I could tell.

This ‘seat yourself’ policy also meant lopsided service areas for the waitresses. Most people don’t really have a firm seating preference, they’ll go where you take them. This allows balance in the dining area, waitresses given grids, specific areas to serve on a balanced, level playing field.  This also explains the issue with twice being asked for our drink order, inefficiency, counter-productivity, disorganization. Not very professional. But so easily fixed. It’s a new place, when we go back in a couple of months we will be looking for this to have been resolved. Seat yourself works in a tiny, ten table diner, not in a full-floor dining area. Also, make the wait staff writes down orders, nobody minds this, but they do mind when their order gets screwed up.

Now the food. Like I said it was pretty good and the problems are easily enough resolved. Trim the excess fat off of steaks, even steak sandwiches. It was simply gross. “Not very satisfying” Is how Adam put it. And seriously guys, the vegetable of the day was frozen? Really? There ought to be a law.

Summary:

Once again this is a brand new place. The food was for the most part good, the selections were attractive and in theory all good ideas. This is not a greasy spoon nor fast food joint, it is expected that the food will be of better quality than those places. It is expected that the service as well will be better. All this place needs to do is fix these little problems and this could be upgraded to a very good place rather quickly.

The bill came to a respectable thirty six dollars and change, including the dollar for the two cents worth of grilled onions. Though not as expensive as some franchise sports bars, or even Munzert’s right up the road, this is about fifty percent more than a diner or fast food place. For this extra cost the service and food quality needs to make it seem worth it.

They’re off to a good start, you’ve got a great location and the city needs a place just like this, but it will not suffer bad service for very long.

___________________

*As it turned out there was a tractor pull at the fairgrounds. This explained the unexpected busyness of the restaurants, the traffic jam on main street, and the much greater than normal number of big, black-smoke-belching diesel pickup trucks in town. Yee- haw.