4Play - OUT OF BUSINESS

NO LONGER IN BUSINESS

4Play Sports Bar and Entertainment Zone
323 Portage Avenue
http://4playsportsbar.com/



July, 2010

Knowing that guys (and many girls) love to watch sports, drink beer and eat pub food, sports bars have erupted all over the city. 4Play Sports Bar and Entertainment Zone promises to bring sports-watching to new heights. Here’s an excerpt of their claim:

Putting a few TVs up and serving chicken wings isn't enough to call a place a sports bar; we wanted to do something major. We made a place with impact - four bars on two floors, a 24-foot HD screen, 35 plasma screen TVs, VIP rooms, gaming suites with pool tables, video game consoles and high end sports simulators – but we maintained the neighbourhood feel of a place that draws people to hang out. 4Play will always have the game on and when you come in, to play or to watch, you'll feel part of the event.

If you’re a sports fanatic and you think the description sounds impressive, one step into this bar and you see that description does no justice to Winnipeg’s best place to watch a game. The theatre-seating provides each cushy and comfy chair with an un-obstructed view of the monstrous screen. The service comes promptly and the menu offers more than the usual sports bar burgers, fries and (of course) chicken wings.

The corn chowder soup comes by the cup or by the bowl. I ask for the cup, which turns up in a French onion soup container, rippling at the rim. I hate to think what the bowl looks like. The rich and cheesy flavour of the broth provides a beautiful conduit for the blend of whole and pureed kernels. The whole kernels give texture to the soup, while the puree adds body and substance. Delicious.

Today's special soup is a cream of potato-bacon. Often, when I think of a potato soup, I think of huge chunks of potatoes with little else. 4Play gives you tiny morsels of potato (this is good) with plenty of bacon flavour, in a very rich and creamy liquid. Bits of onion help to build this deep, complex and delicious soup.

The lemon-citrus shrimp pasta comes with plump, 6-count, perfectly cooked shrimps in a delicious white sauce. The pasta comes slightly ad dente, teeming with slivers of bell peppers. A generous dollop of crab meat finishes the topping. This is a complete dish that I would never expect from a sports bar. My only complaint is that the sauce tastes a little too citrusy for me, but I’m not a huge fan of excessive lemon on my seafood to begin with.

I find two criteria of how certain restaurants serve beef. If you order a medium steak from a pure steakhouse, you’ll often get it closer to rare; if you order a medium from anywhere else, you end up much better done, sometimes with little more than a tinge of pink in the middle. Being a sports bar, 4Play’s steak sandwich comes expectedly closer to medium-well. A great steak features the essence of beef, oozing with juiciness, seared to perfection on the outside. This steak is only slightly charred and has little juice left to the meat. This is not a great steak, but it’s not a piece of dried leather either.

Unfortunately, 4Play’s rotisserie chicken is little more than dried leather. I asked specifically for thigh meat, which they happily prepared for me. The thigh is the juiciest part of the chicken and it takes a lot of heat and time to cook the heck out of a thigh; I hate to think what the white meat would taste like.

Good back ribs—most good meats—come drippingly juicy, tenderly fall off the bone. The ribs here are fall-off-the-bone tender, but they lost their juices. Most places (outside the rib belt) cook ribs in two stages: a tenderising stage where ribs are often boiled, roasted or braised, and a finishing stage, usually involving grilling or broiling. Overcooking in stage one leaves the meat structureless, as it disintegrates from the bone; undercooking in the first stage will leave your ribs tough and chewy. Overcooking in the second stage dries out your ribs and sucks out all the juices. Undercooking in the last stage gives you flavourless and bland ribs. 4Play’s ribs see too much stage two cooking, leaving them hard and dried. The barbecue sauce adds a nice dimension, but it’s not enough to restore moisture to the meat. The side of fries comes deliciously crunchy and crisp, just as fries should be.

In a sports bar, I expect the red meat dishes to come perfectly prepared, enticing the majority of the carnivorous, male, sports watchers to dig in. Ironically, the non-meat dishes at 4Play come prepared very well and the meat dishes leave room for improvement. I get the feeling that the meal takes a back seat to both the sporting event and the beer for most patrons here. The facility is second to none and the array of beers on tap will satisfy most palates. The food ranges from great to mediocre but the whole experience should be a positive one for most visitors.

***½ /5


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