John Brewer’s Tavern, Malden, MA – Is It Any Good?

What do you normally think of when you think of restaurants and bars in Malden, MA?  If you at all familiar with Malden, and own a working set of taste buds, you think of divey places that feature nothing but beers from The Big Three Piss Trough*, crappy food, and people who look like they didn’t get the memo that the 80′s was 30 years ago.  I’m serious…guys with mullets like MacGyver (new tab/window), and women with bleached blonde big hair (new tab/window).  Let’s do the time warp again?

Needless to say, although we live in this crap town, we never go to any of the eating/drinking establishments here.  The closest we ever come is the TGI Friday’s in Everett, the next town over, and surprisingly, it is nowhere near as bad as what they have in Malden.

This is why we’ve not yet tried a fairly new place that opened up in Malden, called John Brewer’s Tavern.  That, and the fact that the restaurant that used to be in that location was a disgusting dump.

If you live in the area, you might remember Bambino’s on Highland Avenue.  It had been there forever.  We tried it once, because The Phantom Gourmet said it was good.  Well, it sucked.  The food was horrible, and the place was filled with all of those trashy 80′s throwback Malden townies I just described.  We sat at the bar, which had no beer on tap.  You see, trashy people live under the illusion that bottled beer is superior to draught.  So when they try to make their establishments look “all high-classed”, they don’t have any taps at all, you have to drink your Bud Lite from a bottle, because that’s the way that “high-classed” people drink beer.

At least they had Sam Adams in a bottle.  They must have thought we were some sort of super rich people who were out slumming, if we could afford to drink that, and not Bud Lite.  But I’m sure they wondered why such a woman of means such as myself could not afford a curling iron to make the big hair with.

Anyhoo, that was the very last time we took the advice of The Phantom Gourmet.  We pretty much stopped watching their TV show after our visit to Bambino’s.  We finally realized that no restaurant is featured on their show unless they pay for the privilege.  Mr. Bambino must have paid them plenty.

We drove by a few months later, and saw that the place had shut down.  We shed not a tear.

It stood empty for quite a while.  Many months later, when we saw that something called John Brewer’s Tavern had opened up there, we were still hesitant to try it.  For all we knew, Mr. Bambino or whatever his name was had just remodeled and reopened the place under a new name.  And managed to attract the same white-trashy clientele back.  No thanks.  This is Malden, we know never to expect much.

So I never gave it any further thought, until last week.  On Facebook, I saw that Wachusett Brewery had posted about a special that John Brewer’s is currently running.  For just ten bucks, you get a burger and a sampler of 4 – 5 ounce beers.  Apparently, this is an everyday special that they will be running for a while.  According to a reviewer on Yelp, they now have 15 beers on tap, and they are mostly craft brews.

Heck, if Wachusett, a very respectable microbrewery, is advertising this, it must be reasonably good, plus they must have at least one or two of their beers available (they did say they had the Blueberry, which I know is very tasty).

And if the emphasis is on craft brews, it may not attract the white trashy townie crowd that Bambino’s did.  Although I’m sure some of them might come in and get their “high-classed” bottles of Bud Lite, and look down their noses upon those of us who drink beer on tap.  But when I think about it, there was a LOT of time that had passed between the closing of Bambino’s and the opening of John Brewer’s.  So perhaps all of the big-haired and mulletted folks had long since found some other dive in which to hang out.

I sure hope so, because tonight, Tuesday night, we plan on giving John Brewer’s a whirl.  Although I’m seeing mixed reviews from Yelpers about the food, we’ll take our changes and try it for ourselves.  And I’ve not seen a negative review about atmosphere, as I’ve seen in reviews of other Malden watering holes.  So perhaps this might be a good place.  They also have a location in Waltham, so at least the owner isn’t some townie thug who wanted to open a new bar for his townie thug friends to hang out in.

I’ll let you know how we like it after we try it!

*The Big Three Piss Trough – an term someone on Facebook used to refer to any beers that are owned by, well, The Big Three breweries, aka Anheuser-Busch/Miller/Coors.  I love the term and use it all the time now!  But I don’t drink from The Big Three Piss Trough!