Barron's BRB Diner

I'll just spoil the ending and tell you that this is going to be be a positive review. Barron's is the student run restaurant that Hilton College uses to train its students in managerial arts and food service, located inside the building and open only for lunch, between the hours of 11:30 and 1. I myself spent a semester and four mandatory credit hours waitressing at Barron's, which is why I will never waitress again and why I'm going to give Barron's an arbitrarily good review. The special the day I went was a burger topped with goat cheese, caramelized onion, lettuce and tomato on ciabatta bread with a side of herbed garlic fries and it was delicious, but how the food was sounds pretty relevant so we'll get down to the brass tacks of this review.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into the restaurant is that the walls were covered in Thanksgiving decorations. You can't know how much that warmed my heart. There is nothing I hate more than waking up November 1 from my Halloween candy coma, looking out my window, and seeing a world already decorated for Christmas. This year when I went shopping for my Halloween costume, Walmart was already selling fake Christmas tress. It's October 20th, Walmart. Nobody wants a Christmas tree. There is not a single person in America, I can almost guarantee, that loves Christmas so much they'll put up decorations TWO MONTHS in advance. I don't care how much you were abused as a child, nothing makes that OK. So I'm going to go ahead and give Barron's +7 for recognizing that there's a whole holiday between Halloween and Christmas, and having the balls to stand up to the world and celebrate it.

The Thanksgiving decorations, my friends, were not even the best part of the restaurant. The semester I was required to provide my free labor in the restaurant it was called Barron's The Stuffed Burrito, and we sold Mexican food and wore ties. Every few years, though, they rejuvenate the menu and rebrand the place, and it recently made the transition into the BRB Diner. The new menus they came up with are aesthetically amazing, which is why I'm now my dad and say things like "back in my day, we didn't have these fancy looking menus, we had ugly ones and everyone just dealt with it." Seriously I'd go back just to look at the menus. They have this cool, 60's mod look to them, and even though it's the same restaurant foundationally as before, I think they really helped make it seem more like an actual diner. Definitely +9 for those. A much more important change, however, was that now everyone was wearing bow ties! Imagine how great it must be to wake up every Wednesday and know that you get to go to class wearing a bow tie! They, truly, are the lucky ones. More important that their feelings, though, are mine: I felt like some sort of president of a small Middle Eastern country or maybe a detective, having my food delivered to me by a person wearing a bow tie. It was even better than having a butler! It was like having a butler, but I didn't have to give them a salary and let them borrow my Jag when they needed to go to the grocery store! +26 for sure!

I want to be fair in my review, however. It wasn't all Thanksgiving decorations and goat cheese and bow ties. There was a cloud on my otherwise perfect lunch. I don't want to scare anyone from going to an otherwise great lunch spot, but in the interest of my integrity I'll reveal the sad truth: My table had a wobble. I know. I know. What could be worse than a wobble? Especially when you're lunching with a date, like I was! You look to your man seductively: "Darling," you say, leaning forward onto one elbow, coquettishly batting your lashes. And JOLT! All your food slams to one side of the table, set on a rampaging course by your uneven table! Disoriented, you lean back. "I was wondering, maybe later," you start, hurriedly leaning back in your seat to pretend you hadn't just destroyed the perfect placing of the restaurant's student chefs. And CRASH! The table rebalances itself, and your food comes sliding back to its original location. "You could come over," you finish, delicately doing a lady like shift which puts one foot propped up on the corner of the table, showing off your hopefully shaven legs and perfect manicure while holding the table down while you seductively return to your elbow, hopefully keeping the table perfectly even so the two of you can finish your herbed garlic fries. All you wanted was somebody to help you change your light bulb, but now, after this non-overdramatized and definitely accurate portrayal of what a wobble can do to you, you're both too grumpy to handle any maintenance at all. Minus 3.

To conclude this review, I'd like to definitely recommend that you try Barron's BRB Diner, and if you have any positive feedback you can email it to arbitrarycriticism@live.com and if you have any negative feedback you can keep it to yourself!