Restaurant Review: Wild Cherry

This could person easy been chaos, but it reads arsenic specified idiosyncrasy, acknowledgment to the sheer unit of Wild Cherry’s entreaty arsenic a spot to portion distant a fewer stylish hours. The euphony is hopping (when was the past clip you heard “Ca’-Ba’-Dab,” by the Soul Swingers, and wherefore isn’t each edifice playing it connected a loop?), and the temper is arsenic lukewarm arsenic the lighting, with affable servers and barroom unit whose enthusiasm is infectious. The cocktails skew tiki—a quart-size scorpion vessel with your dinner?—but they’re great, well-balanced and cleverly composed, similar a zero-proof piña colada that gets heft and extent from hojicha, oregon a sherry highball tarted up with amaro and a splash of cola.

The consciousness of some seriousness and play extends to the food. Among a enactment of chilled seafood is simply a showpiece-y full Dungeness crab served “à la russe,” with stripes of finely minced chives, capers, and sieved egg; and a gorgeous scungilli salad, the tender slices of conch laced with celery leaves successful a punchy vinaigrette, and served piled into the creature’s giant, whorling shell. The approach, implicit all, is eclectic but committed: a brawny kielbasa, redolent of ail and studded with melty Comté, sits atop a languid furniture of sauerkraut; hunks of chermoula-painted monkfish are laced connected skewers and served with a tapenade of olives and raisins. Frogs’ legs—which Hanson and Nasr catapulted backmost into manner with a persillade mentation astatine Le Veau d’Or—are battered and fried similar small chickenhearted drumettes, past glossed successful food and spangled with herbs. The menu’s lone pasta is fettuccine Alfredo, a crockery truthful earnestly retired of benignant that it becomes viciously chill again; the sauce, made the accepted way, from conscionable butter, Parmigiano, and an emulsifying splash of pasta water, is tossed unneurotic tableside by a server, sending good particles of food flying everyplace similar a joyous puff of confetti. For a 100 and 20 dollars, you tin get a steak meal for two, which includes a important Denver-cut filet, a beauteous greenish salad, and an audaciously retrograde baked potato, which is besides disposable à la carte, and which I program to bid regularly, unsocial astatine the bar, with a soiled Martini, and possibly a slab of pineapple-and-coconut barroom for dessert.