Sipping free draft Duvel at Metropolitan Coffeehouse and Wine Bar
Wednesday night, Amie and I headed over to Metropolitan Coffeehouse and Wine Bar (902 S. Charles St.) for some post-dinner drinks.
We ran into some friends at a table outside, who told us there was a tasting of the new Duvel Green, a draft beer, going on.
They had lovely beer glasses with the Duvel logo on them (pictured), and told us even though the tasting was technically only supposed to be using small glasses, if you sweet-talked the waitress, she might bring you some Duvel Green in big glasses instead.
We did just that, and our server brought us two Duvel Green "tastings."
Duvel Green is lighter, crisper and has less alcohol per volume than to the Duvel I'm used to drinking out of the bottle. It was good stuff ...
The owner, Bruce Dorsey, also came out with a rubber Duvel coaster thingy. You can see it in the middle of the photo. I'm not sure exactly what the heck it's called. But I see them all the time on top of bars.
I also discovered that I've been pronouncing the name of the beer wrong. According to the Duvel rep, it's pronounced Doo-vle, not Doo-velle.
Either way, I thought it was dee-licious.
(Photo by me)
Erik Maza is a features reporter at the Baltimore Sun. He writes for several sections of the Sun paper and contributes weekly columns on music and nightlife. He also writes and edits the Midnight Sun blog. He often covers entertainment, business, and the business of entertainment. Occasionally, he writes about Four Loko, The Block, the liquor board, and those who practice "
Comments
Agreed. Very good stuff. I was pleasantly surprised.
Posted by: Brad | July 24, 2009 10:42 AM
i was trying to bite my lip about metropolitan, but i must say i can never go back there again. have been in there quite a few times and have known service is at a "relaxed" pace that is until i went there for lunch on a saturday a few weeks ago. place was not full, but 4 waitstaff were waiting on about 12 tables. two waitstaff should be able to handle that with breeze, but it took 4 people to royally f up lunch service for the whole place. i did not notice anything was wrong until it took my waitress 15 minutes to bring my beer, then i noticed a few people that came in, sat down, and left because not one of the waitstaff greeted them or noticed they came in. some other tables were audibly grumbling about time and food. i ordered an egg sandwich, my gf ordered a tuna salad wrap. time it took to come out of the kitchen: 1+ hour. i am almost sure my waitress did not send the ticket, but i wanted her to tell me that. she didn't, she blamed the kitchen, but hooked me up with a beer about 5 minutes before the food came out, which left me with an empty glass for about 20 minutes. too little, too late at that point. it was one of those moments in which i would have walked out, but was so amazed at what was happening that i had to stick around for the conclusion. the conclusion was that the horrid lunch service made us so late for another appointment that we had to get the food to go. a place is only going to be as good as the kitchen and waitstaff, and if i owned the place, i would clean house before the reputation gets worse.
Posted by: bill | July 24, 2009 11:28 AM
On pronunciation - you can pronounce it either way. As Belgium is a tri-lingual country, everything has a few "correct" pronunciations. Doo-vle is the Flemish pronunciation. Doo-velle, the French.
Duvel is produced in the Flemish Region of Belgium, but no one bats an eye when the French pronunciation is used, so I wouldn't worry too much. You keep pronouncing it however you like, Sessa.
Posted by: Amy Woo | July 24, 2009 1:19 PM