Founders Tavern & Grille

It was a beautiful, cool evening, so when we arrived at Founders, we opted to sit at an outside table, in front of the restaurant. We were the only ones out there, so it was peaceful and pleasant.

The wait staff was very attentive and courteous. I ordered their pastrami Reuben. A friend had tipped me off that they had really liked the Reuben here a few years ago, and I finally found myself in the area to try it.

The Reuben arrived 14 minutes after it was ordered, and it looked kind of sparse, arriving in a metal tray that was lined with wax paper. The first thing I noticed when tasting the Reuben is that the bread was yummy and thick, grilled nicely.

But I have to mention the pastrami which was advertised as "Founders seasoned pastrami beef brisket." The meat was not very tender. In fact, I would say it was pretty tough and hard to pull apart. The flavor and seasoning may have been fine, but I had to deliberately create a track with my teeth through the pastrami for every bite, to keep the entire slice of meat from pulling out of the rest of the sandwich. It was pretty tough.

There was a big clump of sauerkraut on this sandwich, but not nearly enough sauce. This made the sandwich actually quite dry. Because the meat was also dry and not juicy at all, and the sauerkraut was well-drained, I ate the first half of the sandwich as it was delivered, and it was so dry! I was dreaming of dipping it in a big vat of Thousand Island dressing to give it a better flavor. I couldn't actually taste whatever the sauce was supposed to be.

So I asked our server for an extra side of the sauce for the second half of my sandwich. She brought it out, and what a disappointment! I don't know what "po' boy" sauce is, whether it's "po" because they have pity on whatever poor boy has to eat it on his Reuben, but I definitely concluded that "po' boy" equals "po' flavor" as a dressing on a Reuben sandwich. The sauce tasted a lot like mayonnaise and was some type of white sauce--nothing at all like Russian or Thousand Island dressing. It turned out to be a pretty terrible sauce for a Reuben, even when I dipped quite a bit of it onto my sandwich.

Overall, this is a Reuben to avoid. The meat was too dry and tough and the sauce was totally inappropriate. It ended up not tasting very Reuben-like at all. I can only assume that in the few years that had passed since my friend had a delicious Reuben here, that something had changed, and not for the better. Perhaps it was good in the past, but the Pastrami Reuben served while we were there was pretty sub-par.

This Reuben was adequate, but nothing special. The fries were well-prepared, but not super-flavorful.