Griddle 145 Is Becoming The Whitehall Amy’s Baking Company

I tried again. I walked in with an open mind again. I left disappointed again. I spent the night on the toilet….again! So much for redemption.

I went to Griddle 145 back when it opened. I was not impressed at all and put my thoughts here. Since then, a lot of people have given Griddle 145 good reviews on Yelp. The Morning Call even chimed in with favorable reviews of G-145 and its food. So, I decided to give it a shot again. I should have known better. The Yelp reviews are probably written by friends of the G-145 owners. The Morning Call’s opinion is irrelevant because nothing that paper writes has been relevant for 30 years.

What encouraged me to revisit G-145 was the season finale of Kitchen Nightmares. The Amy’s Baking Company fiasco. If you haven’t seen it, jump on Youtube and take a look. Or just Google ‘Amy’s Baking Company’ and see the fiasco the restaurant has become. I have to say, after seeing G-145 yesterday, it’s safe to say that they’re on their way to becoming the Amy’s Baking Company of Whitehall.

On this visit I had lunch. Again, like breakfast, the lunch menu is a little too trendy and ostentatious. The toppings for the burgers seemed experimental at best. The Boomer burger is an example. It’s topped with a fried egg, bacon, chipotle mayo and cheddar jack cheese. There are some things that don’t work well together on a burger. A fried egg, bacon, chipotle mayo and cheddar jack cheese are four of them. My brother decided to have the Boomer for lunch yesterday. According to him it was an “Under cooked pile of shit. The burger was basically raw, bacon soggy, chipotle mayo tasted like it came from a Hellman’s jar and the bun was stale. But in their defense, the cheese was good!”

I went for the Big Cheryl and soon discovered that a BBQ pulled pork sandwich should never be topped with mac n cheese and onion straws. Whatever BBQ sauce that G-145 uses, it’s obviously bottled. Not sweet, not spicy, just the same bland stuff you can get at Restaurant Depot. The bread was fresh, but the mac n cheese was definitely not. Either it came from a Kraft box or the owners simply do not know how to make Mac N Cheese. The Big Cheryl sat in my stomach for the rest of the day. Last night it decided it wanted out of my stomach and I spent the entire evening expelling yet another Griddle 145 meal through my ass.

As for the service, decor and atmosphere of the place….nothing has changed for the better. The owner still pockets the tips and they try to plaster their liberal ideology on you the minute you walk through the door.

In all honesty, Amy’s Baking Company is a better restaurant. I hope Griddle 145 goes out of business soon!

*On a side note, I’ve re-opened the comment option on the CACK blog, so feel free to post. Sorry I took it down for a while. I had little time to monitor the comments.*