You don’t typically associate a brewery with breakfast. But then, Eagle Rock Brewery Public House is less of a brewery than a quaint brunch spot that also happens to serve up a bunch of Eagle Rock Brewery’s beers (the real brewery is located elsewhere in Eagle Rock and is foodless save for the occasional food truck). Thus, after downing a beer I settled on the subject of food.
After looking over the beautiful menu that had just about everything you could want from a brewery aside from a burger and pizza I opted for the Chicken + Biscuits. The menu said this would include a smoked fried chicken leg (hopefully smoked first), cornmeal biscuits and gravy. It turned out that this was a menu of lies, but not the bad kind that involve pickles or lettuce. No, this lie was the whole chicken leg thing. Instead of one leg, my dish came out with a thigh and a breast. Yes, there are worse things to lie about.
The breading on the chicken was perfectly crisp and perfectly seasoned. And on the inside I found a nice smokey taste to go with the flavor of being fried. The only real complaint about the chicken is that it was somewhat dry. I wasn’t surprised because of the smoking process, but I had hoped Eagle Rock Public House had figured out a way around that. The biscuits were unique compared to any biscuits I had ever had before, but the gravy on them was overly peppery, stealing much of the flavor from the gravy and the biscuits.
With a couple of tweaks, this could have been a fantastic brunch. It certainly gets points for doing some new things with a classic. Yet, without those tweaks it was just another brunch spot in a world of many.
