The H Bar at Halls is tasteful and aroma-free

You can probably count the number of restaurants inside department stores on one hand. Maybe two fingers. There’s Cafe Nordstrom, in the Oak Park Mall Nordstrom; and the four-month-old H Bar, in the newly renovated Halls department store in Crown Center.

On my first visit to the very glossy, very bright new Halls store, I overheard an employee refer to the 28-seat H Bar, which has 10 seats at the counter, as “our version of the Walgreens lunch counter.”

Cute. But do any latter-day Walgreens drugstores still have lunch counters?

If they do, I assure you that it’s nothing like the tasteful H Bar, where Halls shoppers can have a stylish little lunch after, perhaps, an intense cosmetic makeover at the Laura Mercier counter, right across the aisle.

In the old days of honest-to-goodness lunch counters (I’m thinking of the Woolworth’s store in my hometown), you could smell grilled onions and burgers sizzling on the flattop as soon as you walked through the door. There are no such culinary aromas at Halls — God forbid the scent of lobster bisque should permeate the fabric of an Oscar de la Renta gown.

Nothing on the H Bar menu — an array of soups, salads, sandwiches and shared platters — is actually cooked in the Halls store. The food for H Bar is prepared at the Westin Crown Center Hotel, which oversees the cuisine at the venue.

“We created the menu with consultations from Kelly Cole (president and CEO of Halls Kansas City) and his staff,” says Brent Grider, complex director of restaurants and bars for the Westin and Sheraton hotels at Crown Center. “We had at least four different tastings and narrowed the choices down.”

Since H Bar opened, Grider says, the restaurant has added a happy hour and extended the hours that soups, salads and sandwiches can be ordered. “When we started serving lunch,” he says, “we stopped offering soups, salads and sandwiches at 2 p.m. Now patrons can have those dishes until 4 p.m.”

After that, Grider says, the H Bar serves three kinds of shared platters (a charcuterie board, a tapas assortment, and a fruit plate) until 7 p.m. Desserts, prepared by Westin Hotel pastry chef Crystal Butler-Brown, are available throughout the day, including a very tasty white-chocolate mousse with coffee gelee, or a pallid and thickly iced spiced-pear layer cake.

The charcuterie board is good  for sharing as a lunch or an after-work snack with a glass of wine or a cocktail (the $10 signature cocktail here combines 3-Star Rhum Barbancourt, Triple Sec, lemon juice, orgeat syrup and Rose’s grenadine). The H Bar version of charcuterie includes sliced salami, hunks of Merguez sausage, marinated mozzarella balls, very pink pickled onions, house-made pickles, crostini, lavosh crackers and stone ground mustard.

H Bar serves pastries and coffee every morning — except Sunday — from 10 to 11 a.m. Lunch is served from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday and from noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Desserts and shared platters are offered until 7 p.m. Monday through Saturday and until 6 p.m. Sunday.