Ko-bar

A jewel box that serves as an airlock for another jewel box. We waited an hour and still left happy, and feeling like this had been good value.

The menu is a line cook's menu, heavy on meat, few vegetables, without a sense of seasons passing. This is supposedly a bar menu after all, fat and salt for lining the stomach. Yet this is a bar that serves 25 dollar glasses of wine, servis compris, attached to one of the city's most ambitious restaurants. It is touted as a testbed for the dining room next door, but much of the menu doesn't seem to have changed since Pete Wells ate here for his review.

Why should it have changed, though, when it is so apt? If you are sitting in this room and drinking cocktails and Côte-Rôtie, sausage and pork pie and pickles in a hot dog bun and fried chicken and steak are exactly the right things to eat. The only problem here is claiming it's a testing ground. Maybe they felt there had to be something ambitious sounding about the bar at Ko, simply because it is the bar at Ko.

The same tension runs through the whole experience - a luxe industrial interior, nearly unlimited amounts of money spent to create the spare lines and hard surfaces of the early years. The laminate is perfect, the light fixtures extremely expensive, the steel barstools subtly over-designed. This hasn't been punk rock for years. Service veers from being hesitant, almost unfriendly, to endearingly earnest. Are we supposed to piss off the guests or is that only on Fridays?

But the food is actually good. It is even, within a particular aesthetic, delicious. In this of all cities and this of all economies, it is hard to eat better for this kind of money, and even harder to do so at a place with this much wine to drink.

Good years

Perhaps not fêted or legendary ones, but pleasing and honest. We poured this too cold, and that was a sin against it. We were hungry, and dinner sat on the table, and we had no time for nicety because we were moving in. Even warmed in our hands, the wine was little more than lean and stubbornly silent. But as the bottle sat, it withdrew its shell, and there was light. It became wholly, wholeheartedly Burgundian. The acid and fruit that initially marked it as Gamay were subsumed into this loamy mass, the occasional blackberry buried therein. The nose especially became celebratory - composed not restrained. It had, in the end, a great deal to say, and I was both sorry it was gone, and that we had not given it air and time before starting.

The clown car

A collection of supposedly great wines behaving badly. The only pleasant one was the Im Sonnenschein, taut, light, complex. The Von Winning 500 was a mouthful of oak and oxidized, raisiny sauvignon, with a subfloor of corrugated cardboard that has been there through every bottle I've had. Kastanienbusch was tired, and tasted like it was from a warmer vintage than actually produced it. Brunnenhauschen nearly made our host cry, disjointed, almost acetic, concentrated fruit feuding with acid at two rapiers' length. The Lemberger was undrinkable.

More supposedly great wines behaving badly. The Pattes Loup was delicious, if nothing unexpected. The Souteronne true to form, meaning slightly funky and rather natural. The Orion was a faceful of volatile acid and bubblegum factory fruit, rather than deep, raspy, leathery, and surprisingly light, as recent bottles have been. The Holger Koch Reserve, capable of greatness, bounced around like a chihuahua on speed, going from mute to ugly to briefly suave to delicious and back to ugly, tasting German one minute, Burgundian the next, and South African in between. The last bottle had been a steady, stately progression, an impressive and entirely expected flowering.