High and Rye recently opened in early March 2018 in Phoenix by the Desert Ridge Marketplace on High Street. This is a Southern American Style Restaurant set up with a very LONGGGGGGGGGGGGG bar that’s packed with a lots of bottles of booze…….It might be safe to assume that many of the bottles are RYE and Whiskies.

This restaurant looks sort of like a shot gun style house when you walk in. It’s long and narrow with high top tables on one side and the longggggggg bar on the other side. If you keep walking you might come across singing guitar player like we did and behind him is loads of seating more bars. It looks oddly large.

From my seat I have a view of High Street.

I tried the Smoked Trout Spinach Salad.

I received a generous amount of fresh spinach. My salad also contained, red onion slices, maple-ly tasting sweet pecans, some marinated apple that looks like chopped spaghetti and was wet and limp like wet spaghetti, and oddly only contains a very small amount of Smoked Trout.

Sorry Folks, I can’t sugar coat this one…….In a nut shell this is not an award winning salad.

The size of the salad is very good and perfect as far as salads go but many things should be improved here if they want repeat business.   This salad cost $14.50 (at the time of this review May-2018). For starters A Smoked Trout Salad needs some Smoked Trout in it. All I had was a little bit of fish that maybe if I added them all together came out to maybe a HALF A FORKING OUNCE…….I had to “FISH” for the Trout. The trout might have been good but it was really was hard to really tell since it was served to me in such small pieces.  I imagine I had less than HALF  a Forking Ounce of Smoked Trout in a Smoked Trout Salad.  I didn’t need a lot of trout…..But I’m thinking if they up the portion size of Trout to TWO ounces I wouldn’t be feeling so bamboozled like I am right now. The other thing I feel the need to put out there was the limp wet chopped spaghetti shaped apple in my salad. The apple wasn’t fresh tasting and was obviously held and kept in some sort of solution that sucked all freshness and crispness  from the apples. Honestly the first few pieces of apple that I tasted I actually didn’t even recognize the fruit as apple. I feel a $14.50 salad should have fresh crunchy apple in it……..How hard is it to grate an apple fresh for each salad………Also while I’m still grumpy I will add that the salad would also be tastier if they did a quick pickle to the onions. This Smoked Trout Salad left me High & Dry at High & Rye. I have to tell The Forking Truth and admit that I was disappointed with the Smoked Trout Salad.

We also shared a small side of Jalapeño Corn Bread.

It came out pretty nice looking.

This Cornbread was like a trip to the Sahara Desert.

It was very dry and lacked much jalapeño flavor.

It really needed the butter but unfortunately it was impossible to spread butter on the corn bread because it just crumbled away like my thoughts of a tasty meal here today. Either someone didn’t follow the corn bread recipe or they need a new recipe for Jalapeño Corn Bread……

Lets move on.

My husband had the Shrimp and Stone Grits with a Hand Crafted Hot Link. Fortunately this dish faired better than the Smoked Trout Salad and the Jalapeño Corn Bread but also wasn’t perfect. (Look this up on AZCENTRAL.com The Food Critic was served a very different looking Shrimp and Stone Grits)

This Shrimp and Grits contained a generous amount of shrimp that were tender and well prepared. Grits were creamy but a little lumpy. The hand crafted hot link wasn’t like a moist juicy and spicy hot link……This sausage was dry and lacked heat. This dish also was also served  warm and not hot.

At the time of this review High and Rye is newly opened and may or may not be fine tuning things.

www.HighandRyeAZ.com

The FORKING Truth is that EVERYTHING is subject to change and your experience may or may not differ.

That was my Trip to High and Rye in Phoenix AZ.