Amsterdam Brewhouse

Toronto's Amsterdam Brewery started life as one, then two, modest brewpubs at a time when decent beer was hard to find in Toronto.  They morphed into a medium size brewery offering "slightly better than Labatts", rather ordinary beers with the occasional more adventurous effort, like Boneshaker IPA thrown in.  They are now back in the brewpub business if you can call a cavern that seats 500 with another 300 on the patio a pub.  It's just opened on Queen's Quay West.  It's an ambitios venture.  Besides Amsterdam's standard eretail line up they have five or six draughts brewed on the premises of a more "craft beer" nature.  they also have a range of freaky, and expensive, bottled beers.  Think a Gueze matured in Pinot Noir casks for nine months with Brett and lacto-bacillus.  Tere's also a slightly higher concept than usual pub food menu.

Ambitious but not there yet.  The service was friendly but with a distinct touch of headless chicken.  A lot of drinks seemed to be ending up on the floor and it was thirty minutes before we got served.  e tried three of the specialty draughts.  One, a sour beer, was outstanding.  The others; a strong ale and an Imperial IPA, were quite good but these days one can find better.  The food wasn't quite as good as it sounded on the carte.  The lemur's duck grilled cheese sandwich wasn't very ducky and my burger was a rather indistinct mush of flavours in a disintegrating bun.  The deconstructed caesar salad was decent though.

Maybe we'll be back when it's had time to shake down.