Imagine a Friday. Imagine a Friday in greater Baltimore area around 2pm, while a giant warehouse in the city happens to be on fire diverting traffic in every inconvenient direction when it comes to getting to Parkville by 3pm. Not a great way to end the day, I’ll tell you for sure. I barely get to Freddie’s Sports Bar & Grill on time, luck out to the only parking sport left as their happy hour is in full-swing with but 1 bartender fighting for her dear tips and sanity, and find one of the owners pretty much hanging out inside of his itty-bitty, busy-as-all-hell of a kitchen. I greet him and the team and tell them I’ll be waiting for the plates I need to shoot out at one of the last two remaining open tables while watching guys shoot pool at the only two, yet APA-grade tables there.
Normally, it’s like a blessing and a curse that I seem to find pool league bars when I go about questing for new spots on my nights out in different cities and towns, so getting to shoot in one should be like a treat. Well, should be is key phrase for this one.
Some minutes go by and one of the cooks runs couple plates to the bar, and I pull him over and let him know to bring the shoot items to the table I was sitting at. Great window lighting, nice wooden grain – best seat in the house for a food shoot. Owner eventually pops out from overseeing the cramped kitchen and voices by all-time favorite phrases to the tune of, “it’s customer food, let’s shoot in the back.” Oh boy, heere we go!
Kitchen is towards the back of the house and is about the size of two New York apartments, so squeezing four members of staff, in there is already pretty generous. The tray of wings, the large metal table, and the deep fryer against the wall was the width of the operation, then a hefty prep table/station smack in the middle of the rest of the space leaving half-a-rat walkways around boxes with more prep trays sitting on top of them. I’ve seen and done this more times than I can count, so I inform the boss that, well, these shots and in fact, any shots, done on those stainless steel tables will look like shit. He doesn’t seem to budge, and my policy is always to care only as much as the client doesn’t. Now the prep table becomes my shot space, the box and plate table as I alternate hovering over the big tray of uncooked wings and chopped onion bowl on the other side of the narrow doorway.
What are customers ordering? Literally nothing but either wings, itty-bitty cheesesteaks, and occasional steamed shrimp. 11am-5pm, odd, odd Happy Hour with $8 ‘steaks and 6 for $9 wings will do that, I suppose, and at least drinks start at $2 for domestic Pisswasser (and kudos to any and all who get this video game reference). If the entire shot list ends up being nothing but fries, cheesesteaks, and wings – I’m perfectly OK with that given the circumstances.
I lucked out to some variety by the skin of my potatoes here, but as you can see – wing sauces and quantities pretty much made up the entire shot list. The saving grace here was that this affair didn’t eat up nearly as much time as waiting for some holy grail orders would have taken, which I’ve more than had to do in the past.
The hilarity of the whole thing happened towards the end of the shoot when the owner essentially told me that he would’ve preferred to do this in the morning, and the reply I got to asking, “well why the hell didn’t we do this IN the morning,” was that he just wanted the annoying, corpo, Goober sales rep out of his hair since the rep was relentlessly bombarding the poor bloke about the shoot. Last time I checked, if the restaurant declines a shoot then literally everyone wins, so hearing of a rep insisting on the shoot sounded modernly odd to me. I replied with the sad reality of a joke that once they got what THEY wanted from the Freddie’s owner – he’ll never be able to reach that rep ever again, especially in time of some need or emergency – and he laughed in agreement and understanding.
Freddie’s Sports Bar & Grill has a four star rating on Maps, and has 2 APA pool tables that are actually free to play, but that’s as far as I can tell you about it. Menu on their website is a mess of either poor or entirely absent food pics, and their socials don’t really showcase anything any better. Couldn’t even tell you about their food since I got nothing but a whiff of any of it.
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