Not Urge-nt

There’s a new “gastropub” in San Diego (Rancho Bernardo, actually), opened by the people who brought you The Barrel Room.  We went to The Barrel Room when they first opened in 2007, for appetizers and once for dinner.  It was fine, and we talked about it here and there, but it was nothing special to draw us back in for a few years, I guess.  Once we heard Urge had its official opening, we drove up for lunch, only to find that they weren’t open for lunch yet; just dinner.  Faced between mediocre Korean food or The Barrel Room, we opted to see how The Barrel Room was doing.

I wish I could tell you we had a lunch that made us wonder how we managed to stay away for so long, but I won’t.

I also won’t tell you how we spent an hour and a half waiting for panini sandwiches.  Now will I bore you with tales of how our server sighed a lot.  Like when we all ordered a create-your-own-panini that required her to write a lot of details down (not our fault the standard menu paninis weren’t to our liking).  And when she brought my sandwich out on the wrong bread (even though I know I repeated my bread choice twice) and I wouldn’t let her take it back to “fix it” because I was hungry and we’d already been waiting a long, long time and I just wanted to eat it.  And I didn’t even finish it because it really wasn’t that good.  I did eat my side of fruit, especially since mine didn’t have any rind remnants left on it.

I won’t tell you how the lady behind us told the server to just wrap her salad up to-go, even though it was still somewhere in the kitchen queue.  And how the three well-manicured guys next to us sharing a bottle of wine told her to wrap their food up to go, even though they ordered after we did.

I will confide that I really, really wanted to go to every person who walked in after we did and whisper that they should run away and not sit down because it’ll be dinner time before they get their lunch. 

Anyway.  Urge is open (for lunch on the weekend? Who knows?) and they’ve finally posted their menu online (c’mon, who waits a week AFTER opening to post their menu?) and it sounds more interesting than The Barrel Room, so I’m willing to give them a shot.  We will see.  But I may not be willing to give them the standard two-visit chance.  If something doesn’t impress me on the first visit, I’ll be waiting for someone credible to convince me to give them another try.