Rafters Sports Bar and Restaurant
442 Amity St., Amherst, (413) 549-4040
Hours: 11:30 a.m.-1 a.m. 7 days a week.
Wings from $5.95. Sandwiches from $8.95.
Forget to pay your cable bill, out of beer and the Red Sox are playing on a Sunday? It’s Rafters for you. Seven days a week this place is serving up wings, salads, pizza that is decent and ESPN, Fox Sports NE, and NESN on three of eight screens in the bar, one in HD. More than just a sports bar, Rafters last week was like something out of a Bruce Springsteen song.
It’s a Monday, the Sox have a much-needed day off after being swept by the Rays, but the Celtics are playing Atlanta in the first round of the NBA playoffs. We go in expecting the usual students, couples, bar people from town. We notice some banners and flags honoring vets and the side room slowly begins filling up: first small families with kids, then five guys with Amherst Fire Department stamped on their jackets and finally the police chief. “Sorry not more of us are here,” he said. At least 50 people bowed their heads during a blessing that began an awards ceremony honoring local vets who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were free wings, both boned and boneless (for some reason), as well as cheese cubes, crackers and grapes.
On the bar side, the Celtics were up early—a good sign, I thought. We ordered the white pizza, which was to our advantage because it had a super-thin crust. The ricotta cheese was sweet and the olives decent. Wings are offered with 10 different kinds of sauce. They were not particularly crispy but fairly hot in a nice red coating. Both the boned and boneless wings were good and came with blue cheese, celery and carrots as well as the choice of 10 sauces. Buffalo chicken wings (bones) can be had in a snack size that can be consumed at a rate of about five seconds per wing. The Grand Slam (50 wings) might last longer than a Youkilis at bat for one person, maybe less with friends. The boneless wings are not spicy and can be ordered by the pound.
At this sports bar the ratio of stuff to watch vs. stuff to eat is about one to one. On deck with the food are Mass Lottery, horse racing, Trivia, CNN, regular TV, and Keno. Menu items designed for multi-tasking: Mountain of Nachos (lots of ‘em), potato skins (decent), fried mozzarella cheese (bland), fries (pretty good), spinach and artichoke dip (uncertain) and a nice quesadilla. Everything comes with decent sour cream and decent cheese, and the frying is clean and not too greasy. Dipping a wing into a small pot of Jamaican Jerk BBQ sauce might take your eyes off the game for a nanosecond but pros use muscle memory. The Caesar salad with Cajun salmon is an appetizer and main course in one dish—your typical bowl of romaine lettuce and croutons has a hunk of salmon plopped right in the middle of the salad.
The menu also has soups, decent grilled burgers and entrees like fish and chips. It’s all about choice. In the bar alone there is lots to do: a lottery ticket machine (Mother’s Day ticket for $2), a pool table, hoop shoot and video games. And there is the side room where at this point the vets are being given $100 bills and a TV crew has come by for a piece of the action.
Nineteen-year-old UMass student Wilfred Melendez has a light, a camera and a microphone in his face but stands tall and proud during the interview. “I was at Abu Ghraib,” he told me. “We shut the place down, but nobody knows that.” Melendez, who is majoring in legal studies and taking a class called Torture and Terrorism, said that the wings at Rafters are wonderful and he would have had more but he ate before coming by for the ceremony.
By the time we left, Atlanta evened up the series with the Celts at two apiece after former Celtics draft pick Joe Johnson plunked down 35 on them. The song “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” was playing on the jukebox. Tomorrow is another day and Lester is staaaarting against Toronto.•
