Schuyler "Dependably Unenthusiastic" C.'s Profile

All things considered, I hold no grudge against Honeyman Hardware Lofts or the property management company that runs the building. Considering how bad most apartments are maintained in Portland, Honeyman was pretty nice. It was the first building I moved into in Portland (back in 2007-2008), and while I wasn't happy with a few things (pros and cons listed below), I never felt like management was a problem. All in all, I remember my time their fondly.

Pros:

1. Location. Ok, so I am not into the Pearl and it wasn't where I would have moved if I had known Portland before moving there, but I am well aware of how desirable the location is and I made frequent use of it when I was there - pretty much leaving my car in its expensive tiny parking spot 6 days a week.

2. Amenities. So this isn't a Manhattan penthouse with an Englishman named Jeeves greeting you at the door, but it was nice having the office accept my packages and it was even nicer being able to use a trash chute. And the fairly new dishwasher was definitely a big plus for me when I came to realize how rare that was in Portland. I know many of the newer places in the Pearl offer these kinds of things, but Honeyman is degrees less expensive than most of those places, fwiw.

3. Management. True, I got a little peeved that there was only someone in the office about 50% of the time there was supposed to be someone in the office, but just having an office that returns your calls is pretty great. And this one bleach-blond girl who worked there was especially friendly and easy to deal with for me (which I really appreciated, being totally new to the city).

4. Paying rent online with a credit card. This is the holy grail for a tenant.

Cons:

1. My unit. Since I was moving from out of state, I signed the lease site-unseen, and the pictures they showed me of similar units had hardwood floors, really nice appliances, and cool lofted sleep areas. While I knew my unit's floor-plan, it was not clear to me that it was carpeted with nasty old carpet or that it was a studio (it was billed as a "1 Bedroom Loft." If I had known it was just a huge studio, I am sure I wouldn't have taken the place. I complained about this on another site a few years back when I was still living at Honeyman, and I think they changed their descriptions to indicate when a place is or isn't a studio.

2. Price. I had mostly lived in bigger and wealthier places than Portland since college, so I just fully expected to be able to find an apartment online. As it turns out, the Pearl is about the only neighborhood where that can happen and so I ended up there. In retrospect, I would have been better off staying in a cheap hotel and looking for places for a week, then moving into a place in Goose Hollow or near NW 21st if I wanted to stay west of the Willamette. And I could have afforded a small house somewhere reasonably hip in inner southeast for the amount I was spending at Honeyman Hardware. I just didn't realize what normal rent prices were in Portland because I had been living in NYC the year before and San Francisco before that. For someone like me (then a 2nd year law student living off of student loans), I would never have moved into a loft in the Pearl, but saved $400/mo and lived in a little 1-bedroom apartment in Sellwood or something.

3. Maintenance. When I first moved in, about half of my windows didn't open properly. It took three weeks to get someone in to fix them. Shortly after I moved out, my garbage disposal clogged and I couldn't use the sink until it was replaced... several weeks later. The garbage disposal repair delay was what convinced me to look into moving our of the building. In retrospect, I would have been better-served just hiring someone to repair it myself and deducting that from rent.

I've gone to Alborz for at least a decade. It used to be my second favorite Persian restaurant in Berkeley, but then Papa's cuisine closed its doors and we started going to the more westernized Alborz. The food is good, and decidedly less greasy and aggressively-seasoned than most Persian restaurants (which is a good thing in my book). And Alborz has a nice, if somewhat dated, look. Service can be a little slow and difficult, as this isn't a family-run-and-super-attentive kind of restaurant, like so many other Persian restaurants, but just a typical California restaurant that happens to serve Persian food. So if you are expecting the owner to chat with you in Farsi and recommend whatever dish has been the most splendidly-prepared that day by his brother-in-law, this probably isn't the restaurant for you. But if you are looking o get some kebab or Khoresht without the chit-chat, Alborz will suit you well.

Ben & Nick's is the kind of anonymous American pub that could be anywhere. They do a karaoke night that's fun despite the bar not having the best layout for it. And they serve food (with table service) that's reliable if not outstanding. The spirit selection is decent and there are about 10 different craft beers on tap at a given time - with a rotating selection. All in all, this is a "Friday afternoon with coworkers" kind of place and not really awesome after about 7:00 pm.

Ben & Nick's isn't a great bar or even a particularly good one, but I have nothing really bad to say about this place, other than mentioning the godawful service we've gotten whenever a certain too-cool-for-school tattoo'd hipster waitress has served us (minus one star for that).

This is a bar you go to if you're in the area, not a destination worth going out of the way for. For what it's worth, I've enjoyed most of my visits at Ben & Nick's.

The hut is probably the most beloved of the rockridge bars among my friends because it is 100% bar (not a yuppy lunch spot), and there is almost always space to breathe at the hut. It helps that the service is prompt.

You won't get a lesson in mixology here, and 90% of the time i order, they are out of one or another of thei draft beers. But you don't go to the hut for  pre-prohibition cocktails, anyway.

I woul like it if the hut was more of a classic dive, with all the ecoutrements one comes to expect from that kind of place, but the hut seems hell-bent on maintaining what remains of its former glory (in another era, it was an upscale English pub, as evidenced by the Tudor facade).

But there's space and a pool table, and no one really hates the hut, which makes it a pretty favorable go-to hangout.

I've found that I haven't reviewed a lot of businesses I have frequented since before Yelp entered my life... so Barclay's, here is your long overdue review:

Barlcay's is a beer bar first and foremost. The number one reason to go to this bar is for the beer selection, clean beer lines, and large British-style pints. This is a really good place to drink beer. I love thier rotating selection - there's always something new to drink, even for a 9th lever beer geek and advanced homebrewer like me. Barclay's will often have rare one-off beers, which is great. While it's not a cheap place to get a beer, it is no more expensive than comparable beer bars, and the location is a hell of a lot better than Beer Revolution or similar places. Really, there is nothing bad to say about Barclay's as a place to get beer in the late afternoon....

But Barclay's is also a restaurant and the food is only okay. The ambience is also only all right, and probably best as a place to pop in for a few pints in the afternoon, rather than a "posting up" type of bar. What I mean is that I have never had a great night at Barclay's nor a great meal - at best I have had a great beer and a good couple hours there. The place is full of big old mismatched tables, which are fun, but which leave little to no standing room. And the British/Irish themed décor seems dated, as well. Barclay's obviously had its heyday over a decade ago, and you can't fault them for sticking to a formula that works. But at this point, Barlcay's is neither unpretentious and inviting, like a true British pub (or a decent dive bar), nor is it sophisticated or cool, like Acme Bar in Berkeley or the Trappist in Old Oakland. Barclay's is just all right inside... and since it is extremely close to the Rockridge BART station, that makes Barclay's a reliable worth-going-to kind of bar.

As a pub, Barclay's is a 2.5-3 star kind of place, but due to its wonderful beer selection and the exceptionally convenient location, Barclay's deserves 4 stars by my estimation. No you won't want to come here for your bachelor party or anything, but you need look no further to get an excellent pint of something you haven't tried before, and that's really something.

I would just write, "this place is awesome," but that wouldn't be very helpful. If you are familiar with Ethiopian food, this place has all the classics, but the menu is slightly more western-friendly than most and the atmosphere is by far more date-friendly than any other Ethiopian restaurant I have been to. Also, it is great for vegetarians and meat-lovers alike.

Wood Tavern isn't really a tavern, but it's a nice casual-but-upscale place for a special occasion (or for everyday if you have a lot of money). Their wine menu is surprisingly diverse price-wise, and the cocktails are ace. I particularly enjoyed the bone marrow they had for a while. But be warned, the food is very rich and rather pricey, so go there hungry and spendy.

A fair taqueria, this place doesn't really deserve all the yelp-love it gets. I mean, I enjoyed my meal and the place isn't expensive or anything, but there are plenty of better taquerias in Oakland/Emeryville/Berkeley. Also, the location is crap.

I waited a long time to write this review so my emotions would cool down and the review would remain coherent. I'm a 28 year-old lawyer and my girlfriend is a 24 year-old high school English teacher. We lived at parkside last year while my girlfriend was getting her teaching credential at UCD and student-teaching in Sacramento. I was studying for the NY bar exam, which I passed in February (though I didn't swear in until June).

In a very safe city, this apartment complex is just about the only really dangerous place to be. The fact that rent is very cheap here and that they offer one-bedroom apartments (rare in Davis) means that the seediest elements in the city (usually "townies" rather than UCD students) flock to Parkside. The nighttime security agency is basically no help, and often fails to record who calls them and who complaints are made against. Add to this, the very real problem of inadequacy in the management of the complex. While we were boring grown-ups (a 24 year-old grad student/high school teacher and a 27 year-old law school graduate studying for the bar exam), our frequent pleas for help from the threats and intimidation against us by our obviously meth-addicted downstairs neighbor went unanswered for months. Only one person in the office seemed sane or rational - the man with the middle desk. But he clearly had to kowtow to the lady that runs that office.

It doesn't help that the buildings were clearly made poorly a very long time ago and are, in many cases falling apart. Even the "renovated" units are often only partially-improved, and the sound-insulation is probably not even to code (we could hear through our bedroom wall when the next door neighbor played video games, even though the sound couldn't be heard in her own living room). We didn't get to look inside our unit when se signed up for a place and were shocked to find that, despite being told it was "completely renovated besides the air conditioning being old," the place was in shambles, with a nightmarish kitchen and a bathroom that began falling apart the day we moved in.

It might be easy enough to assume, if you want to stay near campus and downtown, that you can put up with the difficulties of living here, but there are many better smaller complexes and buildings in Davis to consider first. I am sure our bad experience is unique in that the troublesome downstairs neighbor we had was so uniquely frightening and cruel to us on a daily basis (even shouting at my visiting 57 year-old mom going through chemo at the time), but the way the management avoided dealing with our concerns for so long says something about their competency in general. That said, even before the bad neighbor moved in we weren't very happy with the place. The bathroom and kitchen were a nightmare and the bike rack situation led to my bike being stolen within a month, despite being double-locked. The layout of units are also weird, with no ideal place for a TV and a strange entryway. And don't expect your unit to look like the ones they show you, ours were several degrees worse and I think it's fair to assume that's how many of them are.

It's 2011, so any taxi company that doesn't take credit cards deserved a low rating. The rude cab driver was icing for the one-star cake. Just remember when you're in downtown berkeley: if the cab is red, white, and green; go with someone else.