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.