One80 Proof

When I graduated from bartending school, I briefly took a job in a blue-collar dive that required me to spend more time in the “kitchen” than behind the bar. The claustrophobic space (it had once been a closet) was outfitted with a deep fryer, a grill no bigger than a place mat, a microwave oven and a deep freezer. And no ventilation system, which made breathing difficult if you were frying, grilling and smoking a Marlboro at the same time.

That bar’s menu, if you can call it that, was limited to stuff that could be yanked out of the freezer and either tossed into the snarling fryer or thawed in the microwave and then slapped on the grill. Cheeseburgers, onion rings, cream-cheese-filled pepper poppers, tater tots and thickly breaded fried mushrooms. That was bar food. Salty, fatty foods that tasted good with cold beer and Long Island iced teas.

Lately, though, I’ve had some excellent meals at places that aren’t really restaurants in the traditional sense — they’re bars with kitchens and decent menus. You might say that bar fare has taken a 180-degree turn from those primitive days of ‘shrooms and gloom. The real revolution in bar food actually dates all the way back to the swinging 1960s, when “singles bars” such as T.G.I. Friday’s — in the days before it did its own 180 and became family-friendly — set the tone for hundreds of imitators by offer- ing potent cocktails and elaborate menus. Instead of just burgers, these hip and happening bars offered a wide array of dishes that included salads and quiche, items that had rarely been seen at the neighborhood pub.

Somewhere along the way, those sexy singles concepts morphed into regular restaurants. Lately, bar food has become even more sophisticated, thanks to the whole tapas trend — the Spanish custom of ordering wine and cocktails accompanied by small appetizer plates that can be shared as a light snack or combined to create a meal.

That’s the idea behind One80. If you’re walking past the big picture windows facing Westport Road, it looks like any upscale watering hole. But owners James Westphal, Mark Kelpe and Marty Collins, who also operate McCoy’s Public House across the street, put as much emphasis on the culinary side of the operation as the booze biz. Their first smart move was to bring in Sean Leventhal as executive chef, because he’s put together a tasty mix of familiar bistro fare (steak and frites, French onion soup, steamed mussels) with offbeat innovations such as goat-cheese truffles and prosciutto-wrapped dates stuffed with almonds.

I missed out on the dates (in every sense of that word, alas), but only because I was too engaged sampling so many other dishes on One80’s concise but interesting menu. Leventhal offers fewer than 30 items, but almost all of them taste as alluring as their descriptions on paper, which isn’t always the case in even the slickest of saloons.

After watching some morbid British comedy at the Tivoli, we walked straight into One80 without knowing a thing about it. The menu told me everything. We started with an excellent creamy white-bean hummus and a quartet of fat wonton squares fried to crispy perfection and stuffed with lobster and crabmeat. It was the kind of post-cinema snack that’s memorable enough to make one forget a dreary movie.

I loved the food but found the décor to be disturbingly stark. My friend Patrick seemed mesmerized by the dining room’s focal points: dark wood floors, uncloaked tables, skinny amber lights over the bar, and a modular assemblage of shiny metallic convex lenses above the banquette at the rear of the restaurant. He loved every detail, from the clock displaying the wrong time on the awning over the front entrance (we’re not sure whether it was supposed to work or was a contrived eccentricity) to the oversized frosted-acrylic flowerpots, illuminated from within, positioned in the display windows on the Pennsylvania Street side of the building.

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Those flowerpots are the only thing vaguely reminiscent of the Natural Wear clothing store that for many years occupied this space. Bob didn’t even comment on the décor because he was firmly focused on a crowded bowl of shiny black mussel shells, still steaming and dripping with garlic-butter broth. I had a surprisingly robust cup of French onion soup, and spent most of the time trying to figure out whether it was the caramelized onions or the steamy Guinness broth that was lifting my spirits.

I returned the next week with Yvette and Leonardo, who liked the style of the place even if Yvette’s interior decorator had told her it was ugly. “He’s jealous,” I said as I snagged a square of thin crunchy flatbread covered with fresh-tasting basil pesto; bubbling fontina, provolone and brie; and roasted mushrooms.

Leonardo was charmed by marble-sized “truffles” of goat cheese rolled in chopped pecans and artfully positioned in a puddle of rosemary-infused honey. “Very pretty,” he said, “but what do you eat them with?” Our server, Lindsey, appeared just then, carrying a basket filled with sliced toasted baguette, flatbread and breadsticks. The amber honey was a luscious mix of savory and sweet, and after the truffles were gone I soaked up the rest with some frites — only after we’d sent back the lukewarm potato sticks and received a freshly fried batch, which still weren’t as crispy as I’d hoped.

Leventhal’s menu roams all over the culinary map: Greek saganaki, eggplant strata, a top-notch Monte Cristo sandwich made on egg-dipped challah. Yvette raved about the extraordinarily rich gnocchi, blanketed in a thick, cheesy cream sauce. I suppose it’s in the spirit of international unity that there’s a sandwich called the Italian French dip, which has nothing to do with either country but is a fine variation on the beef-and-baguette sandwich created in 1918 by Philippe Matthieu … in Los Angeles. And Leventhal’s spin on the greasy American miniature “slider” cheeseburger is downright elegant: For the Double B, two black-angus beef patties are stacked between toasted English muffins.

Obviously I’ve never quit eating bar food, though I gave up the hootch years ago. This caused me only a moment of hesitation when server Lindsey insisted that the drunken doughnuts were the best dessert in the house. The pastries, described on the menu as “tiny powered-sugar French beignet brandy donuts,” are made with liquor, but Lindsey assured me that all of the alcohol cooked away. Ditto the Grand Marnier hot chocolate dipping sauce.

Maybe I needed a big slug of uncooked Grand Marnier to believe that one of these cute, powdery confections was anything like a hot, puffy beignet; they seemed more closely related to the Hostess Donette. But the intoxicating hot chocolate sauce made up for a lot of disappointment. And I must have been punch-drunk to eat a couple of those things while wearing a black sweater: I got so much of the confectioner’s sugar all over myself that I walked out of the joint looking like Halston after a cocaine binge.

“You should have ordered the espresso crème caramel,” a friend told me later. “That stuff is so damn good, you could get addicted to it.”

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Don’t tempt me. One80