“FOUR AND A HALF months ago, I did not know that the Berkshire existed.” No, we are not reading your mind. Those words were actually uttered by the Berkshire Grill’s current general manager, Joe Bergevin. He did not start running the place until three months ago, so there is no cause for concern about his sanity.
The Berkshire Grill is an East Coast chain that planned to expand to our country’s other coast. And so they did, and things were fine, at first. Eventually, quality slipped, and things were not working out, especially at breakfast. The grill recently changed hands and is now locally owned and operated. Bergevin is guiding the Berkshire toward a Northwest-centric atmosphere as it diverges from its former corporate-mandated menu. (The wine list, for example, is almost exclusively Northwest.) Customers on a tight budget are targeted: Wines are half price per bottle Sunday through Thursday, and those non-weekend days also include all-you-can-eat nights for $17.99.
For appetizers, starting with the triple sampler platter ($9.49) seemed logical enough. It contained samples of potato skins with melted cheese and bacon bits, egg rolls, and buffalo chicken strips. Two of the three were fine, but the too-spicy buffalo chicken strips ruined the platter. Entrées came out with about the same hit/miss ratio. The halibut and chips ($11.99) was a standout with a foot-long piece of battered fish as the main attraction. (“Foot long” is not a figure of speech. On a later visit, I got a piece of halibut to go and measured it at home, all 13 inches of it).
The filet mignon ($21.99) hit the spot as well. Four-clove chicken ($12.49), served with mashed potatoes, lived up to its name as numerous cloves of garlic hid within the potatoes. The entrée that missed: the Santa Fe veggie burger ($7.99). It tasted like an enchilada in burger form: spicy, with rice and beans. (Of course, if you like your fake burgers to taste like something other than a burger, then this is the burger for you.) For dessert, it doesn’t get much better than organic zucchini cake with vanilla ice cream ($4.99).
The Berkshire features local jazz musicians the first Friday of every month from 9 p.m. to midnight. For another local link, Bergevin opened the walls of the restaurant to local artists, so now diners can get a little culture with their foot-long fish. “Companies have to step up, make a stand, and do something socially responsible,” Bergevin said. And to walk his talk, he has the Berkshire moving toward an organic menu with French-press coffee, organic beer, and the organic zucchini cake.
