What makes some bars so cozy? Is it the drinks themselves, coming fast and fresh and teetering on a small table? The ease of eavesdropping or starting a conversation with the women by your side? Is it that when you haven’t made a reservation or “dressed for dinner,” you can still eat out without feeling like a dork? Is it dining where the bartender knows “your” drink? It’s all of that. And, increasingly, the appeal of a bar is also the food — which has come a long way from salted peanuts and Buffalo wings.
Gargoyles's Jason Santos |
All over the city, restaurant owners and chefs are recognizing that feeding barflies well, and pricing the food fairly, translates into higher bar tabs — and that’s important, since the bar side of a restaurant business is where the money usually is. People tend to run up higher bar tabs when they eat dinner in a bar rather than a dining room. Think about it: when you sit down for dinner in a restaurant’s dining room, you might have a drink, even share a bottle of wine, but you’re unlikely to keep going for a second and third round, into the night. But tucked into a nook at the bar, you drink, eat a little, drink some more, pace yourself, then order something else to nosh on, and the cycle keeps going until it’s late enough to hit the road (sober, we hope).
While lots of great restaurants have bars, only some are truly inviting to guests who want a snack-y sort of dinner. It’s partly the floor plan — the bar has to have enough space and seats so you don’t feel like you have to apologize to the woman who shifted her purse and spilled her martini — and it’s partly the food.
I asked Jason Santos, the incurably inventive chef at Gargoyles on the Square, what makes a bar menu great. “In and out and nobody gets hurt,” says Santos, who changes his bar menu every eight weeks. “It’s the way I like to eat. Bits of this and that, some basic, some ridiculously adventurous. Coming up with a bar menu is perfect for someone like me — with ADD and an obsession so that I think about food all the time.”
Santos defines successful bar food as accessible, built for speed, cheap, and a good value. “It’s comfort food, and it has to fly out of the kitchen fast — no one wants to wait for more than 10 or 15 minutes when they eat at a bar,” he says. “We try for bar food that isn’t too intricate, easy to share, and sort of funky and whimsical. Our mainstays — a burger, duck drumettes, and a pizza — stay on the menu all the time, but everything else is always changing.” On the menu now are fat and fluffy pastrami Reuben fritters; an Italian long-bottom sandwich; tuna tartare; and a plate of mustardy, deviled duck eggs served with bottarga and bits of eel.
