What kind of baby wants to harp on about a club? Not me. When I want to loosen my pelt, this place hits the spots.

Service:
On one isolated visit, our waiter had major sassitude. When I asked if I could get my fries extra crispy, he retorted, “that doesn’t really happen here” hooookay... maybe there would have been a less talk-to-the-hand way of telling me that cooking requests are not accommodated.

Thankfully, this sort of customer interface was the exception rather than the rule. There are wonderful, obliging servers here. I will just try to avoid Mr. Accommodation’s section in the future.

Those fries (delivered by Mr. Accommodation) ended up being a little too blonde for my taste and would have been more toothsome with another dip in the fryer for extra crispy bits (but I understand that that doesn’t really happen here.)

Atmosphere:
This is a small, neighborhood, corner, club. It has a comfortable, informal, modern vibe. There’s a bar along the back wall and a very small open kitchen in the front. It’s impressive the way the cook manages to work in such a confined space. The mise en place takes up most of the counter behind the sneeze guard. A strict economy of movement must be exercised by the chef and his assistant in this micro-kitchen.

Pork sandwich ($8.00):
A Metropolis bakery bun housed slices of flavorful pork loin (and a wonderful carrot and tamed jalapeño slaw with cilantro. The crunchy bunrab friendly vegetation created the perfect balance in this swine meal.

The turkey sandwich ($8.00):
Verged on dry. The aioli and tomato lent enough moisture to pep it up and the bacon gave a nice porky flavor boost. But, this only added up to being okay.

LATER:
I went back and had the re-jigged version (also $8.00) with grilled apples which created the proper level of juicy goodness to complement the oven roasted turkey and Cheddar cheese between 2 pieces of focaccia. A big leap forward from the earlier iteration (although it’s difficult to fathom how replacing bacon will ever lead to an improvement.)

The sausage sandwich ($8.00):
bulged with grilled peppers and onions covering the split and grilled, finely textured Italian sausage. It was good, but the burger is the hard to beat.

The Burger ($8.50):
with grilled red onions, tomato, lettuce and a good beef patty cooked medium rare. This is one tasty burger. Good quality ingredients, nicely balanced with a tang of horseradish and sweetness of caramelized onions playing off the meaty patty. This burger is so good that it has rocketed to the top of the "posh" section of Yummy Chow's Burger Holy Grail.

Mahi Mahi ($13.00):
was the most beige dish that was ever created. Yes, there were flecks of green from the chopped parsley and capers, but the presentation was aggressively monochromatic. It could be argued that the flavors, aromas and composition should be the areas of concern, but the first visual impression primes the taste buds (unless of course, it looks like a Apple Macintosh Classic translated into an entrée.)

It could have been intentional. Maybe the chef wanted to lull the recipient of this dish into a hypnotic state of color deprivation to contrast with the Technicolor Munchkin land of flavor. This firm fleshed fish was cooked perfectly. The pigment impaired bed of fingerling potatoes, cauliflower and browned butter melded well with the moist and tasty brain food.

I wish that they could breed a type of caper that didn’t pachinko ball to the bottom of the
plate. They are like the depressed partygoers of the culinary world, slinking away from the alpha ingredients to mope alone. Smashing them helps, but they really have a problem mingling unless you blitz them into a tapenade in which they relinquish their individuality to the Cuisinart blade. The last thing on my wish list is that they would just rename this fish Mahi. What is up with the Duran treatment of this dorado?

The house made chocolate chip cookie ($2.00):
was good but not great. It’s just my personal preference for the thin, buttery crispy variety (rather than the cakey kind) that keeps me from giving these a high ranking.

Apple walnut crisp ($5.50):
sounded so good. It appeared hot from the oven in a generously sized ramekin. The deal breaker on this dessert was that it had the “apples” but no “crisp.” There needs to be a layer of crispy bits on top of the baked chunks of apple. Sadly, there was just sort of a limp, thin, layer of “topping’ separating the fruit from the crème chantilly. It was a tragedy.