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Music

What Would You Eat? A Depressing Dining Experience at the Dave Matthews Band Restaurant

Admittedly, my previous DMB experience was mostly just that lots of people I went to high school with loved him. I needed time to explore Dave—and to let Dave explore me.

Photo courtesy of The Warehouse Bar & Pizzeria website

Nestled near the western end of Chicago’s spiritually empty Lincoln Park neighborhood is The Warehouse Bar & Pizzeria, a specialty pizza restaurant and bar that opened in September. It’s named for “Warehouse,” a track off Dave Matthews Band’s 1994 debut, Under the Table and Dreaming; its owners, big Dave fans, apparently bought their website’s URL seven or eight years ago, knowing that they wanted to open a place named after the song. Naturally, we had to check it out.

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Before going, I pondered what a Dave Matthews Band-themed dining experience would be like. It’s always best to have as many preconceived notions as possible, so I brewed some coffee, put on Crash, and lost myself in speculation. Admittedly, my previous DMB experience was mostly just that lots of people I went to high school with loved him. I needed time to explore Dave—and to let Dave explore me.

Continued below.

Here’s what I imagine a DMB song adapted into a dining experience would be like: You sit down, and a dude named Grady comes to take your order. He seems soulful and welcomes you by saying, “Can the orderman passing through / Taking whatever for choosing at your tiiiiiii-ime / Telling specials in the space between where you and I / Don’t lie if you’ve been here before,” and then he hits on your girlfriend. You tell him you need a minute, so he leaves and then doesn’t return for half an hour, although you can see him shuffling aimlessly around the restaurant with a bowl of soup and noodling with the idea of putting it on a table. There’s an unexplained saxophone over the sound system.

You look at the menu (the font is Papyrus): There are dozens of pizza options, each with a long list of toppings, but upon further inspection you discover that they’re all just really roundabout ways of saying “plain cheese pizza.” When Grady finally comes back, you order a plain cheese pizza and two Shock Tops. You overhear the couple sitting next to you saying that they’ve eaten at this restaurant every day for the past 12 years and that both of their names are Justin. There are more unexplained saxophone blasts. Grady delivers your dinner, which he explains is a fruit-based Creole-Thai fusion dish laid out in the shape of a plain cheese pizza. It’s actually sand. The man and woman who are both named Justin lean over and tell you that this is their absolute favorite Dave meal. You eat for what seems like forever, and it is.

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Expectations high, I went to The Warehouse. The friendly host seated me and my dining companion at a high table with stools (ugh! stools!). The decor, sadly, was lacking in Dave. Instead of summer tour posters or Dave’s guitars or pictures of Dave’s guitars, it just had the Cubs/Bears aesthetic of innumerable bars on Chicago’s north side, plus a Blackhawks 2015 Stanley Cup banner and about one TV for every four stools (stools! the worst!).

With a decent beer list and specials like $6 Bloody Marys, $3 Fireball shots, and $4 tallboys, The Warehouse definitely caters to the Chicago drinking crowd. I had an old-fashioned, which was sweet but solid; however, the bar missed a prime opportunity to get more down with Dave by naming cocktails after his songs. “The Best of What’s Around” and “Busted Stuff” would be great names for cocktails—docking you a Yelp star, guys!

Among the usual-suspects appetizers (wings, sliders, hummus plate), one beckoned like a Gatsby green light made of meat: the Monster Frites. It was fries topped with shaved beef, bacon, bolognese, sausage, pepperoni, mozzarella, and fresh herbs, served with chipotle ketchup and garlic aioli. We had to order it—minus the cheese, because I’m lactose intolerant. (That’s right, Noisey sent a lactose-intolerant guy to review a pizza place—how ironic and contrarian.) This is what it looked like:

In retrospect, it’s one of the most insane things I’ve ever eaten. It’s a meat salad. It’s the most kinds of meat I’ve ever eaten at once. It’s at the county-fair level of artery-clogging. It was delicious.

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As I worked my way through four-fifths of the Monster Frites (recommended for two to four people) by myself, I realized that while we’d heard plenty of easy-listening bro-jams, we hadn’t heard any Dave. I downloaded the TouchTunes app on my phone and used two credits to have “Crash Into Me” immediately interrupt whatever was playing, because I’d be damned if the several children somehow allowed in this bar left before hearing the song that includes the line “Hike your skirt up a little more and show your world to me.” The crowd didn’t seem too pumped, though, so I played “Ants Marching,” then “Hotline Bling,” because I’m not a monster, and finally brought it home with “Warehouse” itself.

Here’s the thing about the song “Warehouse”: It’s really bad. At just over seven minutes long, it encompasses everything wrong with Dave. It’s essentially tuneless throughout, starting with Dave bleating over a fingerpicked guitar line that is plodding when it’s going for urgent, then inserting some unwelcome, flaccid saxophone trilling. It alternates between folky violin meandering and cloying woodblock/piano jam-bounce before devolving completely into a more straightforwardly boring rock outro. The lyrics are an incoherent mess (“This I admit tastes so good / Hard to believe an end to it / Smell touch feel / How could this rhythm ever quit / Bags packed on a plane / Hopefully to heaven”), and are delivered in Dave’s most high-school-bro “You feel me?” tone. It’s abysmal.

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There are some sandwich and salad options, but most of the menu is pizza. Happily, there were a couple vegan pizzas, and the one we enjoyed was topped with an array of fresh vegetables, including banana peppers, artichoke, and red onion. The other pizza options are mostly pork-centric, but included such diverse toppings as cajun shrimp, mac and white cheddar, and figs, and looked well-prepared and tasty. They also have a build-your-own-pizza section. Maybe they’ll get that Yelp star back after all! Lol ;)

As I ate more Monster Frites and scrolled through TouchTunes looking for the longest live version of “Warehouse” to put on, I thought about Dave’s strange popularity. What I realized is that DMB is the upscale sports bar of music. DMB, like an upscale sports bar, appeals to a pretty narrow white yuppie demographic, and very little to everyone else. DMB seems like a step up over your Jason Mrazes and O.A.R.s, but they’re still limited as a band, and because of those limits, ultimately don’t transcend that boring, easy-listening space. An upscale sports bar might have some extra flair, but it’s still a sports bar. Instead of seeing limits as drawbacks, however, DMB fans and upscale sports bar patrons, whose lifestyle and pop cultural choices often cling to the comfort of familiarity, appreciate them. Limits keep things familiar.

Shitting on people for what they like is obviously very fun and personally rewarding, but what makes things like DMB and upscale sports bars and Bud Light Lime and Starbucks sort of insult-proof is that people who like incredibly mainstream things frequently don’t care to go elsewhere or try something new or listen to other music. It’s like arguing with someone who won’t use elevators that there’s a better way of going up tall buildings than stairs. It’s futile.

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We ordered PBR tallboys, and I recalled when my high school freshman English teacher, a big Dave fan who classmates regularly reported seeing drunk and shirtless at his shows, included Mr. Matthews Band in our poetry unit. Thinking about this now, I’m amazed. It wasn’t part of some, like, special poetry unit where the teacher used contemporary rock lyrics to trick us into studying poetry—it was straight-up, “Alright class, here’s Emily Dickinson, here’s a sonnet, and then let’s do a close read of ‘Ants Marching’—okay, that’s all the poetry for the year.” That’s insane! But at the same time, he was so unabashedly sure that Dave belonged in our personal poetry canon. You have to be impressed with the easy confidence of a serious Dave fan.

TouchTunes wouldn’t let me queue up another live version of “Warehouse,” so it was time to go. Maybe I was a little closer to understanding Dave Matthews Band, and the appeal of sports bars when you’re not watching sports. But everything is relative, isn’t it? We didn’t order dessert so I don’t know if it’s good.

7:06 stars.

[Note for ed: The 7:06 stars is in reference to the 7:06 runtime of the song “Warehouse”]

Devin Schiff is a little ant that's marching. Follow him on Twitter.