Tap78: A "Gastropub"

First of all, apart from being a trendy term, what does "gastropub" mean?  I'm asking.

Second, why would a restaurant (that's what this place is) on 79th Street call itself Tap 78?

But I have bigger fish to fry than fussing about the designation and the name.  This is another of those "good news, bad news" situations.  Here's the good news.  All of it at once,  Lavished on you.  The food was good.  It wasn't great, and my companions and I did not eat anything the establishment prepared.  We got tapas, which were three kinds of cheese, two kinds of ham, some toasted and buttered bread (OK, they toasted the bread), about six olives, and very small dollops of hummus and what was either olive or fig tapenade.  We didn't ask, but I suppose it's possible they made the hummus and tapenade, too.  Let's give them that.  They're only hanging on by a thread anyway.

Here's the bad news.  The menu said wine and beer were half price from 4-7 PM.  We got there at about 6:40 PM.  Great news, right?  No, our stressed out waiter kid said, wine is not half price.  It clearly says it is, we protested.  Well, it isn't, he tragically reassured.  Why we were still sitting there is another matter, and we can take it up with our therapists.  In any event, we agreed to beer.  There's a decent enough beer menu, but we then learned that only an unpredictable sampling of this list is half price.  We agreed to two different beers on tap, and both were good.

The other theoretically good news was that on Thursdays, tapas are half price, too.  What was also not stated on the menu, even in fine print, was another capricious restriction: half price tapas begin at 7 PM.  The trick for us was to order our beer quickly, before 7:00, then wait for our stressed out, way-too-busy, increasingly uninterested waiter kid to come back, which he was never going to do on his own initiative, without prodding from us, so we could order our tapas.  This, in itself, was grossly unsatisfactory.  In the meantime, we all agreed the bugs were getting the best of us, so we transferred ourselves inside, to the noisy and crowded dining area with the equally frustrating "service."

My companions and I agreed that the small tray of tapas, etc, would not nearly have been worth $30.  It was barely, but possibly, worth the $15 our wonderful half price deal demanded.  But at that point, we were eager to wrap things up and get out.  There was just the matter of the bill, which was slightly easier to get than the food had been.  Somehow, I got excused from paying, so I didn't take more than a cursory look at the bill.  It was about $74, before the "tip" (which was going to send a message to our "server").  I was thinking the bill was higher than I expected, but my companion who wanted to pay it snatched it away.  He came back after a while, and announced that after a more careful perusal, and some confronting and negotiating, the staff agreed that half price discounts had somehow not been applied, and that the real total was $39.  Plus a tip that would be intended to give the waiter kid something to think about.

Give them another try?  Um, no, I wouldn't think so.  "You only get one chance to make a first impression," and these people have way too much competition for me to waste more time and money on them.  Besides, I've reverted to a preference for vegetarian fare, and boy, were they short of that.  Suit yourselves, but I'll be elsewhere.