UPDATE: CORNER POCKET is CLOSED
Last week, I was in downtown Greenville SC and decided to try out The Corner Pocket. It had been years and years since I had been inside and I was happy to see that they had done a complete remodel with the pool tables moved upstairs and more of a restaurant/bar downstairs.
I ordered the Reuben with chips and drank a couple of Miller High Lifes. A Reuben sandwich isn't hard to make, since it only contains four items between two pieces of grilled rye: corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and Thousand Island dressing. Anything else is NOT a Reuben sandwich. The hard part for most restaurants, with The Corner Pocket included, is getting the right mixture of each item on the sandwich. The main downfall here was the meat. While, I'm pretty sure it was your standard deli meat bought from someone like Sysco, I could forgive that (even though you're never going to have a great Reuben without cooking your own corned beef), but the meat was skimpy, leaving an unbalanced taste in the sandwich. At least the chips were pretty good once I added some salt.
My wife had the grilled pimento cheese sandwich and it was good pimento cheese; however, the sandwich appeared to be toasted NOT grilled, as the menu had stated. I imagine the pimento cheese probably also came from Sysco or one of the local fresh markets. But really, you can't mess this sandwich up, unless you burn it. She enjoyed the sandwich and also the fact that they had Blue Moon on tap and even knew to serve it with a orange slice.
If you will notice both meals appeared to be orange....I mean sheesh!, I might as well have been eating in Clemson! It's too bad that the food was unremarkable, IF the kitchen would just take a little more pride in what they are serving, The Corner Pocket would have something worth going back for, rather than just food that you wash down with beer.
Fortunately, even though the food was sort of a bust, The Corner Pocket was having entertainment. Since there was no cover, this helped ease some of the pain of three beers and two sandwiches running in the neighborhood of $25.00 before tip. A last note about our waitress, she was new and it showed, but she was still fine with only one major faux pas, someone else at our table, asked for a Budweiser and she said, so help me, "I don't think we have that"!!!!
