Old Meridian Pub redux: Come for the Booze, Stay for the Food!

(Please see earlier post about Old Meridian Pub for more details about the place.)  I had only a smidgen of experience with the food at OMP the last time we were there, so we went for dinner on a Thursday, which is Steak Night:  You get a small filet or medium-sized sirloin and two sides for 8 bucks.  Any misgivings I might've had about eating there were immediately put to rest when I saw Steve, formerly the cook at the Gaslight Inn, come out of the kitchen.  I really don't know much about Steve--  I don't know his politics, whether he likes puppies or long walks on the beach, or any of that stuff, but I do know he REALLY can cook.  I had heard that Steve was working for the Mucky Duck, but alas, I can only assume that the ole' MD is still nearly poisoning its diners as before....  Oh well, MD's loss was our gain, as the OMP's dinner was da BOMB!  My filet was lightly seasoned and cooked to perfection, tender enough to melt in your mouth.  As I've said about some other dishes, I dunno what makes a great baked potato, but this one was equal to the best steak house potatoes I've ever had, and the macaroni & cheese (a potato AND macaroni?  Hey, it was Carb Day as far as I was concerned!), while maybe not the absolute best I've had, was darned good.  The drink specials included a bucket of 5 domestic beers for $10 and my favorite-- their house wine, a Chilean variety, for $2.50 a glass!  (Again, Schneider's take note!)  This was our best trip to OMP yet, and not our last, for sure.

An Update:  An acquaintance of ours went to OMP on a Friday and got the Prime Rib, said it was tasteless, lacked any kind of seasoning.   Although I find that hard to believe, I thought I'd note it for fairness' sake.  Apparently Steve wasn't working that night, but it seems like they would still have his recipes. Hmmmm.....

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Another buddy just told me he went on a Friday and ordered Prime Rib, and it was the best he'd eaten in a long time!  Go figure, but knowing Chef Steve I'd say the one bad comment was a fluke, an anomaly, an aberration, a, a, a, er,  HONEY GET ME MY THESAURUS!

UPDATE, 07/30/2012:  Came to OMP after a disappointing visit to Meridian Fall Bar & Grille (see review) and again was pleasantly surprised.  Well drinks were two, two, two dollars each!  We had the Double Dog Dare, two 1/4 pound chili dogs with chips for $7.99.  The dogs and the chili were delicious (beef wieners and real chili, not coney sauce), although they were on Kaiser rolls which stood up to the massive wieners and chili better than a hot dog bun would, but which were a little more dense and bread-y than I would've liked. I looked around and noticed that the clientele was mostly 35+ in age, although I'm not sure why that is.  OMP doesn't have live music or a dance floor, but it does have great food and drink for a great price.  Cheers!

The Gaslight Inn: Haunted (for Real!)

The Gaslight Inn, 2280 S. Meridian Street, is a little boutique bar masquerading as a neighborhood watering hole.  The truth is that only a few of its patrons come from the surrounding neighborhood, which is kind of sketchy.  Most of the folks that go there are businessmen and working stiffs who stop in on the way home from their jobs downtown, or friends of the owners, high-school buddies Art and Joe.  There's nothing fancy about the place, just a clean comfortable bar in an ancient building that supposedly used to house a mortuary-- it's right next to a Catholic cemetery and a Jewish cemetery.  Perhaps that's why the place is supposedly haunted, with customers and employees reportedly having witnessed unexplained phenomena whenever it's really quiet. We saw the door to the basement close all by itself, t'other day, and it wasn't due to gravity or wind currents, not that I could tell, anyway. (See below for some more ghost stories.) Regular beer prices are good, and the pub grub is GREAT!  Steve the cook knows his stuff, and they often have good beer and food specials-- the all you can eat catfish on Fridays is the BOMB!  $4 glasses of decent wine are the norm, as I write this.  As a practicing drunk (I'll get it right one of these days), I'm not a big fan of the rather weak mixed drinks here (though I order 'em all the danged time, anyway!), but they do often have good drink specials as well as specials on buckets o' beer.  As I said, the neighborhood is just a little bit sketchy, so lock your car and take your keys just to be safe.

UPDATE, 04/14/2012:  Steve the chef is no longer at the Gaslight, but the new cook, Scott, is apparently really talented, foodwise anyway (dunno if he can play the piano, sing, or dance).  We recently had a $5.99 lunch shredded-pork burrito and the Famous Reuben Sandwich that were DEEELICIOUS, so I think Scott knows his stuff, too.

UPDATE 06/11/2012:  They've repainted the interior a bright blue with deep blue trim, which makes the place look bigger, for some reason. ...Turns out Scott used to be the restaurant and catering manager for the American Legion post in Greenwood, IN, which is a pretty big operation.  The story I heard is that he was fired from there for conflict of interest after some family members asked him for part-time help with their restaurant.  I dunno if that's true, but the Greenwood post's loss is certainly the Gaslight's gain!  I had some New-Potato Salad catered from his kitchen there at a recent function, and it was incredibly scrumptious, depending how you like your potato salads:  It even had bacon and little slices of Spanish olives in it,as well as some delicious seasoning I couldn't decipher.  Wow!

UPDATE 02/11/13:  Some recent Gaslight ghost stories:  

1) Tom, a 6'6" regular patron, was sitting at the rather isolated far end of the bar Friday 02/07/13, and had been expounding upon how the stories about the Gaslight being haunted were a lot of horse sh*t, and John (the name they've given the ghost, who is supposedly a former owner of the building) was just a figment of everyone's imagination.  A few minutes later  Tom suddenly said "Ow!" and hopped off the bar stool. He said something had just bit or slapped him on the back of the neck.  When they looked at his neck there were three strip-like welts there like he had been scratched with fingernails.  My Little Woman came in the bar just after this happened and she witnessed the welts.  I later talked to Tom personally he said the story is true-- he said the pain happened all at once, like a from a whip rather than a scratch.  Tom said he still doesn't believe in ghosts, but he admitted he could find no explanation for what happened, as there was no one sitting anywhere close to him.

2)  Tim, brother of one of the owners, said he was the first customer in the place at 11:00 a.m.on a recent Saturday and went in the restroom prior to sitting at the bar.  He went over to the urinal and while he was um, in the middle of his business, the automatic towel dispenser rolled out a paper towel.  The dispenser has a motion sensor on the bottom at which you have wave your hand to get it to activate, and Tim was alone some 12 feet away from it. Before Tim finished up, the dispenser activated two more times!  No one's seen the dispenser do that before or since....   

3)  Joe, one of the owners, came in to open up the bar on Monday 02/11/13 and went upstairs to get something from storage.  The rest of the upstairs has seating but is used for special occasions; so it has speakers connected to the juke box, but they are almost always turned off and Joe hadn't yet turned on the juke box, anyway (see where this is going?)  Suddenly the upstairs speakers started blaring some sort of punk rock song (I didn't know that genre still existed!)  Joe went downstairs to turn off the juke box and saw the "now playing" screen indicated that it was a song from the band named "Gaslight Anthem"!  Cue the TWILIGHT ZONE theme song, boys!