New pub to offer more than 100 beers
The restaurateurs behind the Rancho Bernardo wine bar The Barrel Room will be expanding their range to beer, as they soon will open a neighboring gastropub to offer one of North County Inland’s largest craft brew selections in a single setting.
Urge American Gastropub will feature over 100 beers – including 40 on tap – from San Diego County microbreweries as well as non-local specialty brews from around the country. Foreign beers will be offered from countries such as Canada, Holland, Germany, Italy and France.
The Barrel Room proprietors Grant Tondro, Zak Higson and his brother Nate Higson plan to open Urge American Gastropub in July. Like their wine bar/bistro, which the three Rancho Bernardo High School alumni started in 2007 and own and operate, the new pub-restaurant will feature a gourmet menu to accompany an extensive drink list.
“Just how The Barrel Room focuses on wine, over [at Urge] we’re going to focus a lot on craft brews,” said Tondro, proprietor and sommelier.
Urge American Gastropub will feature artisan microbreweries from San Diego County such as AleSmith Brewing Company, Alpine Beer Company, Mission Brewery, Stone Brewing Company, and Lightning Brewery.
“San Diego is really the Napa Valley of the craft brew movement that’s going on right now,” Tondro added, noting that San Diego breweries rank highly in festival competitions and on the review site RateBeer.com.
To accompany the brews, Urge will feature traditional pub fare with an eclectic and gourmet edge, such as tempura-battered fish and chips and British shepherd’s pie. The menu will revolve around high-grade burgers, such as those made with Wagyû and Kobe beef. It’s all fitting to the definition of a “gastropub,” which refers to the London movement started in the 1990s that reinvents the traditional pub with upscale cuisine. Because of their top-quality ingredients, burgers will cost approximately $9 to $13, said Tondro. Entrees also will mostly fall in that price range.
The new restaurant will combine traditional pub and modern design elements across its 3,700 square feet, which is approximately 50 percent larger than The Barrel Room. Urge’s indoor dining will include 100 seats, and 20 seats will be available on an outdoor patio.
Inside Urge, a contemporary-style bar will be surrounded by five large flat-panel TVs. The bar area will be separate from the table section, so guests have the option for a quieter dining experience.
Urge will serve both lunch and dinner, operating until midnight.
The owners expect to add more than 30 new jobs to the local economy with the opening of the new restaurant.
While built around a similar concept of gourmet food and drink, Urge is meant to appeal to a broader crowd than The Barrel Room wine bar, where the majority of customers are female, said Tondro and Zak Higson. The Barrel Room offers 60 wines by the glass and 250 wines by the bottle. The dining menu includes wine-friendly entrees like Cajun-spiced lamb chops, potato crusted sea bass and chicken parmigiana.
“Sometimes [women] bring their boyfriends or husbands reluctantly because they’re not necessarily wine guys,” said Tondro. “We want to go ahead and have an option for the guys as well, so that when it comes to date night, half the time they come here, and half the time they go there, depending on whose night it is to pick where they’re going to.”
But recognizing that women enjoy quality beer too, Urge is meant to appeal to all ages and genders, added proprietor Zak Higson.
“We’re going to be very unisex as well. It’s definitely not going to be a dive bar; it’s going to be upscale,” said Zak Higson.
The Barrel Room, which expanded last year to offer patio dining, will continue to operate its normal hours, closing at midnight Wednesdays through Saturdays, and 10 p.m. Sundays through Tuesdays.
Urge American Gastropub will be next to The Barrel Room, which is located at 16765 Bernardo Center Drive in The Plaza shopping center in Rancho Bernardo. For more information, visit www.thebarrelroomsandiego.com.
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