Fayetteville, N.Y. — With its perch atop a hill in Green Lakes State Park, offering diners panoramic views of one of Central New York’s greatest natural wonders, Yards Grille’s appeal goes far beyond food.
As opposed to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant that relies on good food to draw customers, Yards Grille’s location and view from the patio overlooking the Green Lakes Golf Course are more than enough to draw a steady crowd of visitors. Truthfully, the restaurant could probably serve frozen pizza and fast-food burgers and still fill half the seats.
But the food is far from an afterthought. Opened in 2021 by Mark Bullis and Nathan Fullmer, the team behind Bull & Bear Roadhouse in East Syracuse and Fayetteville and The Daily Diner in Manlius and North Syracuse, Yards Grille offers a lunch-driven menu of sandwiches, salads and shared plates that are straightforward but thoughtful and fit the space like a glove.
The menu is divided into mains, salads and shareables. The latter isn’t lying about its shareability, judging by our order of crab cakes ($19), which included three good-sized cakes on a bed of spring greens and a generous drizzle of remoulade sauce. I don’t know if I’ve ever said this before, but I actually wish the crab cakes had more breading. There was a good amount of crab in them, including several morsels of lump crab — a nice bonus for a $6 crab cake that could’ve easily been a puck of bread with a faint hint of seafood flavor. But the cakes themselves, despite their golden-brown sear, were soft and mushy, breaking apart on the platter as I went to serve them. A bit more structure would’ve helped what was otherwise a very good dish.
I’m not usually one to order an entree salad, but sitting outside on a warm, early summer day felt like the right moment for the cobb salad ($17.50), the kind of big salad that would make Elaine proud. The large bowl of greens is topped with pockets of sliced apple, chopped candied bacon, cucumber, cherry tomatoes (lightly blistered to add sweetness and cut down on bitterness — a nice touch), crumbled blue cheese, a choice of fried or grilled chicken (I went with fried) and a pickled egg, stained pink from the beet-filled brine. It’s finished with a creamy avocado ranch dressing. As a lover of pickled eggs who ate enough 2-for-$1 pickled eggs at Clark’s Ale House a decade ago to last a lifetime, I think it’s about time the humble pickled egg takes back its rightful place atop a salad.
The RTJ Club ($18), named after Green Lakes Golf Course designer Robert Trent Jones, is, like the golf course, a feat of engineering. It’s nothing fancy, just the usual turkey, ham, bacon, lettuce and tomato between three slices of bread, though the lemon-garlic aioli in place of the usual mayonnaise adds a welcome brightness and acidity. The triple-decker sandwich is served stacked, creating a tower of six pieces of bread and four sizable layers of meat held together by two long bamboo skewers. You might be able to make two lunches out of it, but it’ll be hard to resist eating the whole thing. It’s served with a side of kettle-cooked potato chips.
Desserts are made in-house, and while $14 is on the high side for dessert at a non-fine dining restaurant, the strawberry shortcake, one of two desserts being offered that day (the other was a cheesecake), is easily large enough to split. The sweet biscuit, itself wonderfully tender and something I’d love to eat for breakfast every morning, is split and filled with enough mascarpone whipped cream and fresh strawberries to make another whole dessert. The whole thing, including the exposed inside of the biscuit, gets a drizzle of olive oil, adding a lively zip that ties it all together. It’s a quintessential summer dessert that’s well executed, with a few thoughtful touches that bring fresh interest to a familiar dish…