BAR REVIEW: Maryland Yards

BAR: Maryland Yards
LOCATION: 2033 Dorsett Village Shopping Center, Maryland Heights
HOURS: Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 1:30 a.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m. to midnight
ENTERTAINMENT: Wednesday and Saturday - Great Pretender Karaoke; Friday - Live music; Sunday - Free Texas Hold 'Em tournament
DRINK SPECIALS: Monday - Dollar draft, nine to midnight; Tuesday - Half-price yards, nine to midnight; Wednesday - Ladies night; Thursdays - Dollar Miller products; Saturday and Sunday - Bucket specials
FOOD SPECIALS: Eight half-price appetizers, Monday-Friday, 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.
SMOKING: Yes
HANDICAP ACCESSIBLE: Yes


At Maryland Yards, at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday, a couple dozen regulars and off-duty employees talk each other up with friendliness and familiarity. The lady in her late thirties who just brought your food to you - who appears to be the manager on duty - soon settles in at the next table, sipping from a bottle of Miller Lite and laughing with a customer.

The Muzak is playing Top 40 at soft volume, but you know from experience that the Maryland Yards jukebox overrides the Muzak. It's only too worth the 33-cent-per-song surcharge to make 13-year-old Jo-Jo's song "Get Out" do just that, in favor of James Brown singing "Papa Don't Take No Mess." You ask the bartender to turn it up just a hair, and she gladly accomodates your wish. Cranks it a few hairs, actually. The room is quiet, overall, but it's coming alive.

Come back that same night, at half past eleven, and in that same medium-sized room, the lights are low, there are four times as many people, and the music is so loud it's rattling your teeth. It's Ladies Night, and the drinks are 50 cents for anyone with the XY chromosome. Well drinks and draft beer are served in 10-ounce Dixie cups for the price of a pay phone call.

Your female friends all order two at a time, and one of them keeps sneaking gin and tonic into your full-sized vodka and club soda. You're at the front left table, right in front of the karaoke speakers. You're shouting to be heard by the girl to your left, who's trying to pick a song for karaoke. It's the biggest book you've ever seen - 30,000 songs from Gordon Montgomery's Great Pretender Karaoke.

The atmosphere between your early evening visit and your late-night one is literally a night-and-day contrast, and you can dig both scenes. You can cheat and have your female friends slip you drinks out of a cup that's barely big enough to gargle with, or you can come to happy hour and order $1.75 domestic longnecks and well drinks or house wine for $1.95.

It's all good at Maryland Yards, a restaurant and bar that has been pleasing Northwest St. Louis County patrons day and night for more than a decade. Pool table? Check. Dartboard? Check. Golden Tee 2005? Check. Trivia games on several TVs hooked into the national NTN trivia network? Check. Sports bar potential? Check. Bipolar atmosphere? Double check.

Maryland Yards is split into two equal-sized rooms. In the front room, you'll find a wooden bar that seats ten - five down one row, five down another perpendicular one. You may slide into one of the antique-seeming but sturdy wooden booths or settle at a four-top rectangular table or round high-top table. You may end up at the uber-loud karaoke VIP tables near the men's room.

You may show up an hour ahead of any of your friends and find yourself studying the oddly rustic design of the room. Gentle lighting is provided by several wall-mounted and ceiling-hanging green lamps that appear to be straight out of a 1940s-detective movie. Stare at the ceiling, and you'll see a series of wallpaper-looking carvings, simple wood paneling and diagonal mirrored squares.

You may also get yourself a trivia box and log onto NTN or watch a baseball, football, hockey or basketball game on TV. Wherever you sit at Maryland Yards, you're never more than ten feet from a mounted television showing local and important national sports games. That includes two new flat-screen plasma TVs that hang at opposite ends of the bar and a monster big-screen at the center, where the bar curves.

Or you may decide you'd rather hear yourself think and head to the back room. That's where you'll find the jukebox, pool and darts, and though you'll hear the collective roar of lively, booze-fueled conversation, it never gets too loud.

Heck, you may even get bored and find yourself in the hallway connecting the two rooms, staring at the Polaroids on the "Live Goldfish Shot" Wall of Fame board. Wonder how much tequila it would take to get you to drop a wriggling guppy into your drink. Wonder if the PETA organization ever decided not to hold their holiday party at Maryland Yards because of all the photographed and proudly displayed cruelty to fish.

Drink gimmicks aren't really your thing, but you can't begrudge any social drinker the opportunity to get on the fame wall or to attract the attention of the other patrons by putting down the credit card deposit and ordering one of the bar's namesake yard glasses. That's three feet of beer and the potential for a whole lot of broken glass.

Maryland Yards has ten beers on draft. Bud Light is king, of course, but you can also switch things up with a full-bodied Bass, Guinness, Killian's Red or Sam Adams Boston Lager. Or go lighter with some Miller Mite, Lebatt's Blue, Boulevard Wheat or, your new favorite, Leinenkugel's Honey Weiss. Non-happy-hour prices range from three bucks to $4.50, with most domestic pitchers under eight dollars. Twenty bottled beers and wine coolers range in price from $2.75 to $4.

You usually arrive too late to order food, which is a shame. Maryland Yards has an extensive, affordable and consistently satisfying kitchen. Which is impressive for a barely franchised local bar - there's one other location, on Main Street in St. Charles.

When you do make it in before the kitchen is closed but after the lights have been dimmed and the karaoke started, you might order a thin-crust, St. Louis-style pizza. Sizes range from 12" to 16", at prices starting between $6.50 and $8.75, and Yards offers all the standard toppings plus a few imaginative ones. Or one of the handful of salad and soup selections, which include homemade red chili and white chili.

You might also order from the practically page-long list of appetizers, from pretzel sticks and cheese fries to spinach-artichoke dip to multiple quesadillas. The veggie quesadilla ($4.95 - half-price during happy hour) is of a generous size and topped with finely shredded cheddar cheese and chopped green onions. Inside, amongst the peppers, mushrooms and more cheese are enough jalopenos to make your nose drip.

The quesadilla satisfies you, but it soon becomes apparent that, if you cook eight types of vegetables on barely leavened bread, the whole affair will have a soggy bottom before you even get halfway through. Also, you're gonna need more napkins here than you would for your average bar fare, especially when the jalopeno nostril drip sets in.

Come to Maryland Yards in the daytime or early evening, and you can make an official meal out of the experience, for under ten bucks. The bar offers half-pound steakburgers ($5.50) you can add six types of cheese to, along with 15 other sandwiches topped with everything from chicken to fish to turkey to corned beef to barbecued pork to steak - ribeye and prime rib.

You like to order the spinach-artichoke chicken sandwich ($6.75) with no bread. It's 50 cents cheaper to order it that way, but the no-bread option also transforms this sandwich into a lunch-sized entree plate befitting a far classier restaurant. You get a tender four-ounce grilled chicken breast topped with liberal spinach dip spread and oven-baked with provel. You can even substitute green beans or cottage cheese for the crinkle-cut french fries most customers succumb to.

This particular Wednesday night, though, you're here to drink at one of the karaoke VIP tables. You spend three hours with more than 20 of your friends in a space that's designed to hold ten. You mingle, you sing, you order Bud Light pitchers, you have a ball. The waitress severely messes up your party's check, some of your friends underpay their bills, you guys drunkenly fight about it and the waitress starts crying.

But you'll be back, you'll apologize to the waitress, she'll give you two hugs while you chow down on a Santa Fe Wrap ($6.25) - which is really just a taco salad burrito - and you'll drink exactly two beers. You can't stay mad at the waitress for long, and you can't stay away from Maryland Yards too long either.