Crows Nest Takes Green Hills Dining to New Heights

Details:

Inside the dimly lit and pinball-addled two-story building, Cyndi Lauper bellows out the final chorus of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," her brash voice competing with the beeps, blips and doooioooioooings of doomed video game characters. The lip-gloss-licked amoeba of hormonally charged girls oozes across the room, from the Donkey Kong corner to the Asteroids table, perusing the high scores—with vague hope of recognizing a three-letter monogram—and occasionally stopping to roll the white ball of an idle Centipede game.

Fortunately, a lot has changed since then, including clothes, music, hair and Gameland itself, which ultimately morphed into The Box Seat sports bar and reopened this fall as Crows Nest.

The latest project of the Corner Pub Group—which operates The Corner Pub in the Woods, The Alley and Dalton's in Bellevue, Austin's in Fieldstone Farms, Joe's Place on Bandywood and The Corner Pub in Midtown—brings together a handful of guys who remember the heyday of Gameland from their own denim-clad youth. Corner Pub Group owners AU Telwar, Doug Crow and Joe Gower have teamed up with restaurant veterans Keith Blakely and Ted Shelton—high school buddies of Telwar and Crow—to reinvent the popular Green Hills address with a multimillon-dollar renovation. Then they brought in general manager Nelson Green from Las Vegas and recruited chef Kelly Wetherford, an alumnus of The Trace, South Street and Bound'ry, to oversee the food.

Gone are the pool tables, replaced with seating for more than 250. While there are no longer video games, there are plenty of electronics in the high-tech bathrooms, where everything is automatic and video panels in the stalls display news and advertisements, like the backseat of a Manhattan taxi.

For anyone who ever skulked in the dark corners of Gameland or circled the smoky pool room of The Box Seat, Crows Nest is both a comfortable trip down memory lane and a welcome acknowledgment that life has moved on. The building is clean and smoke-free, the food is modern, and the restaurant is kid-friendly—after all, even pinball wizards grow up and breed. But the songs of Journey and Billy Joel climb the open central staircase and circle the sleek new HDTVs in the upstairs bar like a musical jab of I-know-what-you-did-last-century.

{mosimage} 

Chef Wetherford's double-sided menu runs the gamut of fried pickles ($6.95) and smoked wings ($8.95) to a crab cake sandwich ($10.95), gnocchi with shrimp and sausage ($15.95), seared tuna salad ($12.95) and ribs ($19.95), and tops out with a 14-ounce rib eye for $20.95.

It's a formula that defies easy classification: It's not exactly bar food, but there's a robust bar scene. It's not ladies-who-lunch fare, but the ladies who lunch in Green Hills should discover the seared tuna salad with miso vinaigrette and Asian slaw, topped with wasabi peas and cashews. It's not exactly a family restaurant, but it would be hard to name a place that treats kids better than Crows Nest, with its $5.95 kids menu. Whatever you want to call it, Crows Nest is the type of catch-all restaurant that has been missing for so long in Green Hills, and it has already insinuated itself into our all-purpose working-lunch-family-supper-and-dinner-before-a-movie repertoire.

Among the standout items are the house-smoked meats, including the pulled pork plate (with hot-water corn cakes) and the barbecue ribs, which come 14 baby backs to a slab. Crusted with lightly caramelized bits of bark, the moist pork clung to the bone just enough to require gentle gnawing, but wasn't so soggy with sauce that it was a messy meal.

Our young and very charming server, who had little or no awareness of the storied past of Gameland and The Box Seat, steered us toward the baked stuffed oysters, which made for a generous shared appetizer. A half-dozen shells served as a canvas for a rich breadcrumb stuffing of bacon, mushrooms, spinach and Parmesan, which oozed over plump succulent oysters and was lightly crusty on top. The accompanying ramekin of drawn butter was redundant, but the side of roasted red pepper remoulade offered a cool counterpoint to the hot and buttery dish.

As much as any item, the fried green tomato appetizer showcased the Crows Nest's updated spin on traditional cooking. The stack of three panko-coated golden-brown disks layered with goat cheese and garnished with a bountiful spear of rosemary seamlessly modernized the traditional Southern fare.