Standard Pour is now pouring, and serving food, in the old Boozefish space
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You could say that 1511 Westport Road has had a long saloon life over the past century. Some still recall that address as home to Bender’s Bar & Grill for decades, others as the not-long-departed Boozefish Wine Bar. Whatever the name and whatever the year, though, it’s not a place you’ll ever see dark for more than a short time.
And the newest saloon to take the reins here — the Standard Pour, which opened June 13 — has done more than just turn on the lights. Owner David Sederholm, a vice president and portfolio manager with the Commerce Trust Co., has brightened up the room and begun to make it his own.
Sederholm is a buttoned-down kind of guy and, at 60 years old, an unlikely candidate for barkeep, but this turns out to be his dream project. “It was one of those bucket-list things,” he tells me. “I grew up in Montana, and this space reminded me of the bars I used to patronize as a young man.”
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Sederholm has done a smooth job of renovating the former Boozefish, moving an interior door in a century-old brick wall, taking down the old awning (which now lets in plenty of lights through the transom windows) and installing a long banquette along one wall to face shiny high-top tables. The bar, installed by a previous tenant back in the 1980s, remains. It looks like an antique, but Sederholm says it was created for a Gilbert-Robinson restaurant in Chicago in the 1980s.
The menu features five starters (including buttermilk biscuits), salads, four sandwiches, a wrap, smoked-chicken pasta and fried chicken. Local chef Joe Shirley created the original menu as a consultant, but current executive chef Travis Meeks has been tinkering. The house Reuben sandwich — delicious, by the way — boasts house-brined corned beef and house-made sauerkraut. “We also make the tomato jam for our chicken burger,” Sederholm says, “and the onion jam for our version of the BLT, which we call the Standard Bolt.”
Sederholm says the new venue is attracting “a lot of young professionals, retired people, young married couples.” They tend to eat earlier in the evening, he adds, well before the kitchen closes. But then comes the pour part: a good beer list, an approachable wine list, and a 1:30 a.m. closing time.
