Char Bar Smoked Meats & Amusements is killing it in Westport

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Westport’s two-month-old Char Bar is such a good idea that you wonder why no one thought of it before James Westphal and Mark Kelpe — creators of McCoy’s, Beer Kitchen and the Foundry — got there.

The restaurant’s allure goes beyond a fine array of smoked meats (though that appeal is serious — it has been some time since real barbecue could be had in Westport). There also are the yet-unopened “amusements” — including, among other things, a fire pit, a croquet court and enormous tire swings — to distinguish Char Bar from its peers and rivals. But what ultimately separates the whole hog from the ham here is an eclectic menu that’s imaginative enough to satisfy ‘cue-philes and ‘cue-phobes alike. (A vegetarian can get damn full at Char Bar.) The dining room is warm and accessible, and the serving staff mostly grasps the fairly extensive menu, doesn’t oversell the cocktail selection, and is well on the way toward understanding the fine art of timing courses. It’s not all perfection yet, but it’s pretty close.

Yes, I’ve endured one erratic server, but that was once in four visits (good odds, in my experience). And I confess that I managed to find one dish that made me regretful, but that was mostly my fault. I know better than to order a dish in a barbecue restaurant because it sounds vaguely healthy. But it was right after New Year’s, and I felt compelled to pump the brakes on all the barbecue I’d been eating to write this review. (My revised 2015 resolution: Never stop.)

That dish aside — OK, OK, it was the jackfruit sandwich, and I’ve never enjoyed jackfruit anywhere, so I should have had the portobello sandwich — I was impressed by the options for less artery-clogging cuisine at Char Bar, where a “vegetable” is more than a fried spud, slaw or baked beans. Is creamed asparagus — smothered in a spicy hollandaise and topped with a soft-poached egg — green and leafy? Well, no, but it’s in my food pyramid now. Here, you spread the stuff lavishly on grilled triangles of toast, and you think about it longingly the next day.

I’d never really longed to set foot again inside the Beaumont Club, the music venue that used to be at this address and which, for many years, dominated this stretch of the Manor Square building. But Kelpe and Westphal have removed all Beaumont traces, subdividing the space and using half of the former nightclub for Char Bar — still nearly as big as an airplane terminal but with better lighting and acoustics.

The noise level in the lower-level dining room is about right for a space laid out this way. I found it perfectly easy to converse without straining to hear, despite the room’s many hard surfaces. There didn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to the background music that I heard during my meals (one night’s heavy techno sound was distractingly rave-y), but that gave the place a certain maverick sensibility. Char Bar is more upscale than, say, Arthur Bryant’s or Rosedale Bar-B-Q, but it’s not stuffy or even slightly predictable.

That said, what is Char Bar? I mean, what kind of place offers hush puppies that taste like crab-free Rangoons, deviled eggs tarted up with charred lobster, and smoked chicken wings of a mass that suggests they were ripped off a passing hawk?

You could call it a place of bold ideas, even if not every such notion works. I wanted to love all the side dishes at Char Bar, but the pit beans I tasted were unmemorable, and the smoked-corn succotash was much misplaced ado. The fresh-tasting carrot-raisin slaw was better — a nice spin on that old church-supper favorite — but the rough-cut cabbage slaw almost made me long for the cheap stuff that comes out of a bucket. Better suited to the style consciousness on display all around was an artsy, and mostly workable, slaw of chopped kale and grated pecorino.

Char Bar may be the only barbecue restaurant in town where one can dine sumptuously on soup and salad. The duck gumbo I tried was thick and pleasing and, on a frigid winter night, just what I needed. I also liked the salad that put roots (roasted beets, parsnips and onions) and fruit (well, oranges, anyway) with goat cheese and crispy Brussels sprouts under a piquant blackberry-wine vinaigrette. And for the meatless-minded, there’s the smoked jackfruit again, in or out of that sandwich. The tropical cousin of breadfruit has become a popular meat substitute because of its flaky texture and its ability to adapt to spicy flavors. Alongside real meat, it doesn’t totally fall apart, but I can’t help thinking of it as the Birkenstock of barbecue.

But let’s talk about the meats. The staples are all here, and Char Bar does well by them: tender ribs, thick-sliced Black Angus brisket, pulled pork butt, all smoked over a fragrant hybrid of hickory and pecan. The sauce is shiny and molasses-sweet, though the tables are set with bottles of a spicier concoction. The burnt ends are excellent and tender, the house-made sausage discreetly seasoned. There are outstanding burgers, too: One blends chuck tenderloin and beef short ribs; the other starts with the brisket, gets some additional smoky notes from bacon and gouda, and is topped with a generous jumble of caramelized onions.

The burgers have their own amusements. You can order one with pork rinds, fried pickles or three kinds of fries (hand-cut, sweet-potato or battered). My favorite deep-fried delicacy on this menu: heavily breaded slices of green tomatoes that have been left in the cooking oil until their armor is gloriously crunchy.

That same crunchy sensation is also the appeal of the Tabasco-honey chicken wings, which come perched atop a savory bacon-cheddar waffle. Depending on where you fall in the chicken-and-waffles camp (I like them decadently sticky and sweet), you can dress yours with a pitcher of bourbon syrup or a dollop of that smoky hollandaise.

Speaking of sticky and sweet, the most familiar pastry on Char Bar’s dessert menu is that barbecue standard, peach cobbler — ample if you’re somehow still hungry, and flavored here with bourbon and maple. More intriguingly, there’s a fine charred variation on crème brûlée (with butterscotch custard), as well as a chewy funnel cake made with a sweet-potato batter and garnished with candied bacon. The immediacy of fresh-fried funnel cakes works better on a carnival midway than at a sit-down restaurant; this puffy fritter’s too-yammy constitution becomes apparent as soon as the dish’s novelty wanes.

The Char Bar menu proclaims the place the “House of Meat,” but it’s a good deal more than that. The hard part for a place this ambitious, typically, is making sure that the genuine imagination so visible now doesn’t grow stale or balloon into a culinary Char-toon. But for now, Kelpe and Westphal and their crew make it all look pretty easy.