Restaurant Review: Restaurant Review: Uptown Sports Club

The fried green tomato po'boy at Uptown Sports Club is a gold medal winner (Photo by Jana Birchum)

The first time I went to Franklin Barbecue, Aaron Franklin himself served me a magnificent pulled pork sandwich out of a tiny teal trailer. It was a testament to how Franklin had mastered his craft, doing a few things extraordinarily well.

Since then, Franklin has stayed in his culinary lane, branching out only to collaborate with Tyson Cole on the Asian-barbecue fusion restaurant Loro. Until this year, that is, when he opened Uptown Sports Club with two partners, James Moody (Mohawk founder and partner in Franklin's Hot Luck Fest), and Fort Worth attorney Jason Jones.

The building at 1200 East Sixth has a long and storied history; it was built in the 1800s and once housed a German butcher before settling into its identity as a neighborhood bar called Uptown Sports Club. It sat vacant for more than 20 years, until Franklin and his crew reinvented the space into a New Orleans-themed restaurant and bar.

We checked out Uptown Sports Club on a Friday night double date. The four of us crammed into the tiny foyer, waiting for our turn to check in with the host. We had just enough time to order a round of drinks from the bar and take a few sips while standing awkwardly at one of two long tables right in the middle of dining room traffic before our table was ready.

We started with the smoked trout dip from the "Raw Bar" (very little on the Raw Bar is actually served raw) as a starter. It came out almost immediately, served in a bowl lined with lettuce leaves, with saltines and Zapp's for spreading and scooping. There wasn't a detectable smoky taste; indeed, the dip had a very mild flavor that I needed to lively up with dashes of Crystal hot sauce and a squeeze of lemon.

We also shared a cup of gumbo, which had a weak, underdeveloped flavor. The roux lacked depth, and it tasted of dried herbs and celery seed. It also lacked okra, which is a must-have for gumbo in my opinion.

We ordered two po'boys – the hot roast beef and the fried green tomato – with mixed results. The hot roast beef was loaded with shredded roast beef that was not hot but was both wet and salty. The fried green tomato, though, sang. The tomatoes were tart and tangy and held up well against the mess of mayo and shredduce on the sandwich. (I'm told that it's extra good when topped with a little crab salad from the Crab Louie.) The Leidenheimer rolls, shipped in from Louisiana daily, were fresh and soft.

We ordered the steak frites to share. The strip steak was cooked on the high end of medium – in fact, some pieces were medium well. Despite being overcooked, the fat on the steak had not been rendered; the meat wanted seasoning and some char/crust. The steak arrived with a cold circle of herbed butter on top that never melted. It was a very disappointing way to spend $49. (The fries and accompanying aioli were nice, though.)

For dessert, we chose the bread pudding, which was silky and perfectly baked. It's a shame that it was served in a pool of broken caramel sauce that tasted burnt. In what was a theme throughout our meal, it was served without spoons, so we had to ask the food runner yet again to please bring us utensils, as everything but our napkins had been cleared.

The true stars of the show were the thoughtfully curated cocktails. My spouse loved his El Jardinero, a lightly spicy margarita that blends Aperol, blood orange, and Cointreau with blanco tequila and a hint of jalapeño. My Rope a Dope, made with gin, St-Germain, blueberry, lemon, Rambler sparkling water, and "absinthe mist," was refreshing on a warm, early-summer evening.

My spouse and I returned for lunch a few weeks later. Things got off to a promising start with the wedge salad, a huge hunk of iceberg lettuce draped in a kicky house-made ranch dressing and accentuated with bacon, blue cheese, and tomatoes. It was crisp, cold, and delicious. I thought that my bad first impression might have been a fluke, but that hope was extinguished when our sandwiches arrived.

My burger and the fries that came with it were overcooked (the fries were basically inedible), and the burger was salty and tasted of old oil. My spouse's shrimp po'boy suffered from similar problems in execution: The shrimp didn't taste fresh, and the bread had spent too much time on the griddle.

As a splurge (and because it was hotter than hell's pepper patch outside), I ordered an orange & cream freeze, which New Orleanians might expect to be more like a slushie, but is actually a milkshake. Make no mistake, it was delicious, but $12 ($18 if you add booze) for a milkshake is utterly audacious, even though they are handcrafted with an old-timey milkshake machine.

Ultimately, Uptown Sports Club is an interesting concept that suffers from unrealized potential due to lack of attention to details that would make guests feel more welcome. Due to the tight passageways, awkward places to wait, and cacophonous acoustics, I wouldn't take someone in a wheelchair or with other mobility or hearing challenges to this restaurant. There are also errors in execution that need to be addressed. Why make all that effort to ship a specific bread from Louisiana only to serve it with lackluster roast beef that's on par with something you'd make in the Crock-Pot at home, or griddle it for so long that it loses all its pillowy lusciousness? Don't serve steak if you can't guarantee it will be prepared properly, even on a busy Friday night.

The menu at Uptown Sports Club, like the one at Franklin Barbecue, is small. You have a small menu because you want to knock it out of the park. Unfortunately, right now, Uptown Sports Club is a swing and a miss.

Uptown Sports Club