Patrons sit down for lunch Thursday afternoon at Oblivion Brewing Co. in Bend in 2015. (Ryan Brennecke / The Bulletin)

Bend’s new Oblivion Brewing Co. makes really good beers. The food, while creatively conceived and delivered in generous portions, falls short of its promise.

That’s the summary review in 25 words or less. Readers have a right to expect more. Here’s the rest of the story:

The company website describes how owner Darin Butschy, 45, began homebrewing while in high school in Walnut Creek, California, and after graduation apprenticed at the Devil Mountain Brewing Company. By the age of 19, he was the head brewer at a small brewery (now Firestone Walker) in San Luis Obispo while he studied chemistry at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He graduated in 1994 and moved to Bend, for the beer and the powder snow.

As he saved to open his own commercial brewery, and continued homebrewing as a hobby, Butschy worked as a cook and in construction. He met and married Meghann McDaniel, started a family, and together the pair planned a 10-barrel brewing system. They established Oblivion in 2012, started brewing on a half-barrel system the following year and by the summer of 2014 had their 10-barrel system in production.

Dream comes true

The brewpub took another year to become a reality, but when it opened in the last week of May, the Oblivion dream was complete. The Butschys took over the former Westside Café & Bakery on Galveston Avenue and gave it a thorough makeover, converting a once “cute” family eatery into a very different sort of establishment.

The new Oblivion Brewing Co. has a distinctly industrial appeal with its painted concrete walls and overhead ventilation ducts.

Two adjoining rooms are accented by a couple of neon lights in the style of the 1950s, and a garage door, easily pulled open in fine weather, has replaced what once was a solid wall. The pub seats 12 at its bars, another 30-plus at eight tables, and a pair of TVs unobtrusively broadcast sports channels.

Service for the most part is prompt and efficient, if inconsistent. When I first visited with my dining companion, the pub wasn’t particularly busy, but we waited for what seemed an unusually long time before our dishes were delivered. And about the time we tried to hail our server for our check, he was dashing to the 7-Eleven store across the street for a restaurant purchase.

Food falters

As far as the food was concerned, I haven’t decided if the failure stemmed from poor execution, a lack of inspiration or an attempt to be too creative.

A beet salad, for instance, featured pickled shoestring beets on a bed of arugula and curly kale. It was tossed with pecans, dried cranberries and dollops of chevre cheese, and served with an unusual beet-juice vinaigrette. Both my companion and I thought the salad would have been better had chunks of roasted beets been used. But she enjoyed the addition of strips of tender, medium-rare flank steak.

My chicken salad was a good salad, except that the chicken seemed like an afterthought. The mixed greens included pea shoots and basil in addition to more usual lettuces and arugula. A variety of sliced cucumbers, tomatoes and red onion, along with chevre, made this a fine veggie plate. But pieces of smoked chicken breast were merely covered in a house-made “Q” (barbecue) sauce and thrown on top of the salad, not blended in. And a smoky tomato-ranch dressing left much to be desired.

Shortcomings

The same Q Sauce was used in the pulled-pork sandwich, which features pork smoked in-house. Although brioche from Big Ed’s Bend bakery has replaced the sourdough waffle used in a panini in Oblivion’s opening menu, this sandwich still seems to have been pressed and fried. Deep-fried onion rings have lost their crispiness as part of this sandwich, which also is served with house-cut fries.

My brother, visiting from out of town, ordered a “smoked salmon sando” and was disappointed that the house-cured lox was far too salty for his taste. Nevertheless, he ate half of the sandwich, served on toasted spent-grain bread with triple-crème Brie cheese, marinated onions and cilantro aioli.

My regular dining companion’s shrimp and grits also were not particularly to her liking. Although she enjoyed the mild spiciness of a Sriracha glaze on her plump prawns, served with bacon-cooked collard greens, she found the grits not as coarse as she prefers. A mix of Gouda cheese and heavy butter produced a very creamy blend of hominy.

— Reporter: janderson@bendbulletin.com