Date Night visits a Roswell institution that has been here for over twenty years. We have driven by the Brookwood for all twenty of those years and have never tried it, until tonight’s date.

Let’s go inside and see what’s on the menu. There’s a big bar upfront with a baby grand piano.

Live entertainment is available from Tuesday thru Saturday. Tonight, there is a “piano man” playing, which gives the bar a festive Friday atmosphere.

The dining room is dark and clubby, and a hard place to get a good picture. There’s lots of wood and many booths. The open kitchen goes almost the full length of the dining room.

Every now and then you see spectacular flames jumping off of the grill as something is cooked. As we shall see later, there’s good food coming out of this area.

As always, Date Night likes to start out with beer. Tonight, we are both having the Founders Breakfast Stout. It’s thick and rich with a slight hint of coffee. This is a good beer for a cold night, perfect for tonight’s weather. One quibble: there are no prices on the draft beer portion of the menu, which means we have no idea what they charge for the beer until we get the check. If you guessed eight dollars, you would be correct.

We start things off with the salmon hushpuppies.

Not only is this a unique appetizer, it’s one of the best we have had in a long time. We highly recommend this dish if you visit. It’s like an orbit-shaped crab cake with salmon. There are three sauces on the plate, ginger, mustard, and sirracha. As you can imagine, each brings a different taste.

Our waiter goes gaga over the onion soup, which we feel will warm us up tonight.

It’s hot, cheesy, and not too salty. The croutons are described as “rustic” on the menu. We are expecting some nice chunks of French bread under the cheese, but our croutons are small, cut into perfect cubes, and look like they came out of a box. Perhaps they need to go to the French bakery down the street and buy some baguettes.

As we were being seated, we noticed that the entree portions are quite large. We decide to split an order of ribs since they are described as “the best in Atlanta”. Someone has to investigate that claim.


We get to pick two sides and go with the asparagus and macaroni and cheese. (They split the rib order in the kitchen.) The ribs are moist, tender and cooked exactly as they should be, but you should go to a BBQ joint if you want the best in Atlanta. The mac and cheese has a lot of love in it and is probably the dish that stands out the most on this entree.

You can see more of the Brookwood Grill in our exclusive Tastemade video.

Because we share everything on Date Night, we sometimes have room for dessert. We’re glad we had room for this one:

The strawberry shortcake Fosters features grilled pound cake topped with fresh strawberries and homemade cinnamon whipped cream. Although we really enjoy this dessert, they should have called it “shortcake Fosters” as there were hardly any strawberries on the pound cake. We don’t seem to mind, though, as we try to lick the rum and brown sugar sauce off of the plate.

The bottom line on Brookwood Grill: We can see why The Grill has been filling up Roswell diners for years. The service is good, the food is tasty and the space has a nice neighborhood vibe. If you live in Roswell, you probably know a lot of the people who eat here. The live entertainment is a nice touch. Now if only they would do something about those croutons in the onion soup…