D.Rough and I were in Burnsville to see Tracey Morgan perform. We needed to eat before the show, so we went to Roasted Pear since the menu looked like it had some good things to eat when we looked online. When we walked in, we joked about the mix of people inside. It honestly was like 60+ happy hour. The entire bar area was filed with older people and they were having a blast. I’m not joking one bit – these people were rocking this bar. Not a few people, a lot of people.
When we sat down and got our menus for happy hour, we figured out why. There’s a complimentary burger bar setup near the bar and the old guys were swarming this free burger area. Their wives were eating food they ordered off the menu and the older guys were eating for free and drinking tons of free refills. Really a hilarious situation, when you stop and think about it.
D.Rough and I helped ourselves to the burger appetizers and were expecting small sliders. But nope. These were full sized burgers – they weren’t bad, either. Standard, but still better than some fast food places I’ve had. And did I mention they’re free?
D.Rough had ordered some fruity margarita and it showed up in this really large glass. This is her trying to look angry that the drink was so large. Ha ha ha.
We got a couple of apps off the happy hour menu – a dozen wings, some sweet potato fries with various dips, and a mini giardiniera pizza. When we ordered the pizza before, the server said, “obviously you’ve had this pizza before.” And we both simultaneously said, “No. Why do you ask?” She then proceeded to tell us this pizza was extremely spicy and people sometimes had serious issues with it. We assured her we were alright with the spice level.
Everything arrived all at once. And we started in on the sweet potato fries. Really quite good – even better than we expected. The dipping sauces were ketchup, some Asian stuff, BBQ sauce, and then some really random sauce we had to ask about. As soon as the server told us it was a rootbeer sauce, we could taste it right away. Not bad, but reallllly weird flavor with fries.
The wood-fired wings were decent wings. They weren’t slathered in sauce, and you were supposed to use the sauces that also came with the sweet potato fries, so that worked out – the Asian dipping sauce was the best we decided. The wings were a mix of drummies and wings and were cooked just fine. No complaints on these, but pretty standard.
The pizza was good – quite good in fact. It was covered in peppers. HOT peppers. The server was correct in warning people about this pizza. It is probably the hottest giardiniera I’ve had in a long time and it was delicious. The flat-bread style pizza was covered in a thin layer of mozzarella cheese and a few bites of tasty Italian sausage, but mostly covered in peppers. It was a tiny bit oily, but mostly it was great. D.Rough let me eat most of the pizza, for which I was thankful. I’d highly recommend this pizza if you’re alright with some heat.
This was a fantastic random choice for our pre-show dinner. It would have been great, even without the burger starter, but I’m really glad they were good burgers. The servers that helped us were really nice and one server recognized my Minnesota RollerGirls sweatshirt and knows one of our friends. Small world.
Top 5 things about Roasted Pear
1. Giardiniera Pizza
2. Complimentary burger bar
3. Sweet potato fries and dips
4. Giant margarita
5. Fantastic happy hour menu and pricesBottom 5 things
1. Wings were just alright
2. Not a young person’s hang out (despite the food being really good)
3. Weird wine room that seems out of place in this casual environment
4. Maybe consider putting some indicator of spice level on the menu for the giardiniera5 .We felt bad for not actually getting anything with roasted pears (I think there’s only one item on the menu with roasted pears)
www.roastedpear.com
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