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Bluestone - Chef Scott Walker's Abundant American on Aylesbury Road in Timonium


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So my dad turned 70 recently, and my aunt and uncle wanted to take everyone out to eat near Cockeysville. I was left with research and although I pushed for the Orchard Market, we ended up going to Bluestone in Timonium.

It is a real suburban style restaurant with a large bar filled with middle aged singles on Friday night. They specialize in seafood, and all in all, it wasn't that bad.

We started with a few appetizers:

the flash fried calamari- not bad, it came with a sweet "thai" dipping sauce that was like sweet and sour, but the calamari was good with nice breading
a dozen oysters- CT bluepoints- good- with cocktail sauce
Bluestone salad- good in that it had large pieces of brown sugar coated bacon- i could have just eaten the bacon

For entrees:

I had the Rockfish special with a nice saffron beurre blanc- fish was delicious- cooked well.
Other people in our group had the scallops, crabcakes, and chilean sea bass (tubefish). All were prepared nicely- crabcakes were good sized, not quite jumbo, but definitely lump. Scallops were pretty good sized as well.

For dessert, we had strawberry short stacks- a mashed up pile of strawberries, marscapone cheese cream, and shortbread.

I don't think it's worth a drive from DC, but if you're in the area, it's not a bad place to try out.

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So my dad turned 70 recently, and my aunt and uncle wanted to take everyone out to eat near Cockeysville. I was left with research and although I pushed for the Orchard Market, we ended up going to Bluestone in Timonium.

It is a real suburban style restaurant with a large bar filled with middle aged singles on Friday night. They specialize in seafood, and all in all, it wasn't that bad.

 
Bluestone is owned by Bear Management Group, which also runs Trapeze in Maple Lawn and Nottingham's in Columbia.

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Went to Bluestone with friends (they live up that way). It's a beautiful space and they have a friendly staff.  The food on the menu sounds really good, but I left the meal feeling, well, maybe not 'Meh.' but more like 'Kind of a let down based on what I read from the menu before going there.' Still, not a bad option, but I would not go out of my way to go there again - but certainly with friends up that way.

Hog Wings - their take on buffalo wings done instead with a braised pork shank and then buffalo-ed. Let me  just say that this was very tasty - but I had assumed that they'd take this off the bone and portion control it. Nope. Still on the bone, they served you two with a blue cheese laden greens to go with (those were meh) - but for an appetizer? Wow, I am glad I have a large stomach otherwise there is no way I would have made it through the main course.

Soft shell crabs - crusted and done in a pan and oven with lemon buerre blanc, corn pudding and asparagus - Well, the soft-shells were delicious, but could have been SO MUCH BETETR if they treated them with a lot more respect - the crust was almost uniformly falling apart. The sauce was pretty non existent, The asparagus where fine, but would have been better roasted. The highlight of the dish, though, was the incredible sweet corn pudding - really great that.

I got to also taste the cream of crab soup (pretty darn good and correct portion size), as well as the scallops dish (ginger butter, pine nuts, almonds and sultanas) - the scallops were a bit over cooked and the accompaniments were great, but came with loads of broccolini and roasted potatoes - they need to exercise portion control. GAH!

We opted to have some Fenwick Bakery (in Parkville, MD, near our friends house - highly recommended!) peach 'cake' back at our friends home, really great.

Anyway, you won't have a bad meal here, but just remember their tendency to have huge portions and a somewhat golem-like hand in handling the dish and plating of same.

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Went here again with the same friends (the husband of the couple had a stroke about two years ago, and this place is close to their home and is easy to maneuver in the parking lot and inside the restaurant as he uses a cane now).

We'll be trying to veer them away from this place going forward. :(

The previous experience was OK. This one was not so great.

They have a crab and avocado starter that is tasty, but a bit too big and muddled in execution. And it was the better thing we had.

The fried green tomatoes were too thick, so much so that the centers of the tomatoes were not even warm. Meh.

The rockfish was prepared fine and was tender and juicy and.....underseasoned. And further complicating the dish was placing it on top of a melange of small potatoes and cubed/stalked vegetables that were even more under seasoned and made eating the fish impossible until you moved it off of all of the lumpy bumpy stuff it was sitting on. Why would you plate it like that!!???

The lemon parmesan cobia was OK, but suffered from sides that made no sense (more of the same cubed/stalked undercooked and under seasoned root veg and a dollop of black rice that was just meh.

Service was fine, the space is still fine, the food was.....OK at best. So will be looking for some other options in that area the next time we get together with them. Oh well.

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