With Gram & Dun, Urban Table works through some growing pains
I never imagined that the best part of a restaurant experience could be paying the bill. But Gram & Dun, the new “gastropub” on the Country Club Plaza, makes forking over a credit card kind of fun, even for a hefty tab.
As at this restaurant’s sister venue, Urban Table in Prairie Village, the bill arrives in a vintage book instead of on a tip tray. Don’t expect a great work of literature, mind you, but there’s wit in some of these flea-market hardbacks. One of my checks came presented inside Touched With Fire, by the never-to-be-forgotten John Tebbel. I also got a look at a slim 1950 guidebook called Living With Teeners, by Grace Sloan Overton.
But it wasn’t Overton’s timeless advice about raising adolescents with help from the Bible that caught my eye. Inside her teen treatise were handwritten comments from previous Gram & Dun diners, some of which were more riveting than the book itself. There were glowing observations about the food and service (and a few scathing insults). In a note to another day’s server, someone had penned: “Will you go out with me? Please circle one: Yes. No. Maybe. P.S. I’m smokin’. “
The word maybe had been circled. Did the waiter or waitress really go above and beyond the call of duty and respond this way? (Coy but guaranteed to earn a decent tip, if not an actual date.) I could have ordered another espresso right then and stuck around for another hour to read all of the comments, but I was already late filing this review.
The “tip book” is a delightful eccentricity, the kind that makes you realize just how much Gram & Dun needs to find itself. The stylish, attractive new restaurant calls itself, as a kind of subtitle, a “gastropub,” but repeating a word that has become trendy in other U.S. dining markets isn’t the same as claiming an identity. A gastropub serves food and booze, I guess, but in this city, gastro seems more likely to evoke thoughts of gastroenteritis. Besides, you can call this joint anything you want — a pub it ain’t.
This L-shaped restaurant (once home to Parkway 600 Grill and Baja 600) has been gutted and redone for maximum luxe dazzle, with a chandelier dripping crystals in the building’s dome room and a richly stocked bar. The walls are a cool gray, and the floor is made of dark, wide planks. Calling it a pub is sort of like calling actress Helen Mirren a broad.
And broad is a good word to describe Bradley Gilmore’s restless menu. It’s all over the map: Asian pig wings in a sake-soy glaze here, mussels and frites there. Want Brunswick stew? Check. Korean beef short ribs? Sure. Fried chicken and waffles? Really?
Yes, really. In fact, Gram & Dun’s version of chicken and waffles is this city’s most ladylike incarnation of a lusty soul classic. The round waffles are cute little puffs the size of drink coasters, and the cornflake coating for the chicken has been pulverized to the consistency of potting soil. Why use cornflakes to create a crust that’s just barely crunchy?
That’s only one of many questions yet to be answered about Gram & Dun. The biggest: Why is the kitchen so inconsistent? The sweet-tea-braised pork shoulder — a dish that sounds fantastic, as described on a menu that makes many alluring promises — was served scandalously fatty and stone-cold the afternoon I ordered it. Talk about something that should have been touched with fire.
“That’s funny,” our server said. “It came out of the kitchen hot.”
At any temperature, that poor pork shoulder was a piggy $19. It’s easy to rack up a supersized tab here — the menu and prices are identical for lunch and dinner — even when sticking to sandwiches, which run $11–$14. But the sandwiches I’ve tasted have been outstanding, including a grilled cheese made with luscious short-rib meat. It was fantastic, though I longed for a cheese more intense than provolone.
I found the sharper taste I wanted in Gram & Dun’s version of barbecue: an oversized cornmeal bun heaped with tender smoked beef, slices of hot link sausage and pulled pork in a distinctively fiery sauce. It’s a really first-rate sandwich, but even better is a sassy spin on a roadhouse favorite, a sloppy-Joe-style sandwich made with ground wild boar and a dollop of Carolina slaw.
You may have figured out by now that there aren’t a lot of choices for vegetarians here. The mustard greens are cooked in duck fat (and loaded with a taste-prohibitive amount of garlic). The quack lard also makes an appearance in the house-made potato chips, which are deliciously crispy and greasy but probably not worth the added cholesterol count. Even the popular appetizer French onion dumplings — doughy purses of molten Gruyere in a caramelized sweet-onion broth — are made with beef stock (as any French onion soup should be). The only meatless entrée is a plate of ricotta-filled wild-mushroom ravioli smothered in a thick blanket of cream-based “vegetarian Bolognese.”
Strict vegetarians won’t want the marshmallows in Gram & Dun’s namesake dessert bar, but it’s very fine: three slender frozen rectangles with layers of chocolate mousse, marshmallow and peanut nougat, sided with peanut-butter ice cream. It’s served granite-hard, but give it a few minutes to soften up and sharing becomes easy. I wanted to be entranced by a scoop of buttered-popcorn ice cream draped with salted caramel sauce and peanut brittle. It’s a clever novelty, but the best buttered popcorn is still the kind served hot, in cardboard boxes, the way the kids in Living With Teeners would have ordered.
The well-trained servers wear a kind of Jetsons uniform — a black vest over a gray shirt — that suggests a 1980s-sci-fi-movie vision of “the future.” It’s the kind of outfit that makes you hear Philip Glass in your head — though the loop of half-decade-old Top 40 that plays in the restaurant is more apt to make you feel stuck in a Grey’s Anatomy rerun.
So far, the place appears to be very popular, so co-owner Alan Gaylin is doing something right. The far-flung menu needs editing — it’s probably too ambitious for the Country Club Plaza, land of California Pizza Kitchen and Noodles & Company. But let’s not close the book on it yet. If this is Urban Table in its teener-acting-out phase, Gram & Dun might yet become a fine adult restaurant.
