RESTAURANT REVIEW: So far, So good, and brunch even better

The Pan Seared Sea Bass, sauteed with with shiitake mushrooms in a delicate lemon beurre blanc, comes on a bed of grilled scallion orzo at So Restaurant Bar.
The Pan Seared Sea Bass, sauteed with with shiitake mushrooms in a delicate lemon beurre blanc, comes on a bed of grilled scallion orzo at So Restaurant Bar.

They're not doing anything special to celebrate as far as we can tell (and it's possible the current management isn't aware of the milestone).

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Chilaquiles, a brunch entree at So, features asada-style steak, tortilla chips, onions and roasted peppers, all served on the skillet on which it’s cooked.

But as you read this, it has been exactly 10 years (plus a month) since So Restaurant/Bar opened in what had been a cozy-coffee-shop-cum-lunch-and-brunchery called The Living Room on Kavanaugh Boulevard, just as the artery starts its ascent from Hillcrest to the Heights.

So Restaurant/Bar

Address: 3610 Kavanaugh Blvd., Little Rock

Hours: 4-10 p.m. Monday-Wednesday; 11 a.m.-2 p.m., 4-11 p.m. Thursday-Friday; 9 a.m.-2 p.m., 4-11 p.m. Saturday; 9 a.m.-2 p.m., 4-10 p.m. Sunday

Cuisine: Eclectic

Credit cards: V, MC, AE, D

Alcoholic beverages: Full bar, impressive wine list

Reservations: Yes

Wheelchair accessible: Yes

Carryout: Yes

(501) 663-1464

sorestaurantbar.com

So is a high-end restaurant, but it's also one of the closest things around here to a nice little neighborhood bar, especially following the demise of The Afterthought. There's a regular bar (or bar-cum-dinner) clientele whom the bartender and wait staff know by name and who know each other, or who are easily able to make comfortable conversation and even friends over a cocktail or a glass of wine. And So still offers its extraordinary, lengthy and prize-winning wine list.

The establishment, although its public areas are now at street level, still has a kind of rathskeller-like atmosphere, helped in large part by the stone-and-cement feature wall that runs behind the bar, and which is probably the first thing you'll notice about the place when you come in.

There are three dining areas. The front room is slightly more formal, with four four-top tables and moderate natural lighting. In the rather darker middle room, the bar-facing tables have primarily banquette seating. And to the back is the nicely naturally lighted former deck/porch/patio, framed and covered long enough ago to have gotten a little shabby -- fraying area carpets cover most of the weathered concrete floor, and some of the tables are showing their age (and a lot of wear). It does, however, offer a fascinating view, overlooking the next-door garden store and the roofs of proximate apartments.

The kitchen is in the basement, which means your waiter has to traverse a flight of steps carrying your food (up) and used dishes (down).

As a restaurant, So also has had its ups and downs, but it appears, with the advent a few months back of Cody Rudd as executive chef, to be on the upswing.

We enjoyed what we ordered from Rudd's new menu, but some entrees could induce sticker shock. It's not just the raw-bar prices, which have always hovered around the $100 mark (top of that mark now is the So Lux, $95, which includes a dozen oysters, a dozen shrimp, mussels and two king crab legs, but, observe, please, it serves two). We'd be interested to see who's paying $85 for the 18-ounce poached lobster tail with herb risotto, sauteed asparagus and garlic butter.

We can certainly recommend, to open, the Seafood Fondue ($17), large enough to serve two, shrimp and crab meat in a thick, cheesy Cajun bechamel with ciabatta bread for dipping/scooping.

The French Onion Soup (bowl, $7) was satisfying and surprisingly filling. Intrepid Companion, working her way through the top layer of cheese, the crouton immediately underneath and the well-seasoned broth, ran out of room before she made it to the bottom layer of onions.

From the raw bar, though thankfully it wasn't raw, we have high and definite praise for the Fresh Alaskan King Crab Legs (market price per pound); unlike too many crab legs, blandly done in a paltry, ordinary crab boil, these are very richly flavored. We paid $35 for three-quarters of a pound, not bad if you figure in the labor involved in splitting those legs to give us almost ridiculously easy access to the firmly textured crab flesh, and that ease of access also meant we wasted very little of it.

We were simply blown away by that evening's Nightly Chef Creation, a Beef Wellington ($38), perfectly cooked prime rib (or something very close to it), swaddled in a thick, tasty pastry shell and served on a bed of corn-asparagus puree with a generous side of au gratin potatoes. We ended up taking about a third of it home, where it was equally delicious (including the potatoes) as cold leftovers.

If you're looking for something perhaps just as good, but more delicately flavored, try the Pan Seared Sea Bass ($36), sauteed in a very delicate lemon beurre blanc with shiitake mushrooms and served over a delicious grilled scallion orzo.

So has, thank goodness, scrapped the overpriced, undersized Sunday buffet brunch ($25 for a tiny handful of options, none of which were worth returning to the buffet for seconds) for a new Saturday-Sunday brunch menu, with Cody Poe as chef-in-charge. The food is not only worth going back for, it's practically a bargain -- both dishes we tried offered huge amounts of food for relatively little money. (Be aware: Both these dishes, served on the skillets on which they were cooked, were just a little oily.)

If you're looking for vivid flavors, head for the Chilaquiles ($10), a higher-end version of the popular Mexican breakfast dish, with asada-style steak (the waiter asked us how we wanted it, and it came out that way, medium rare), Monterrey jack cheese, shaved onion, roasted peppers and "fire-roasted salsa" over tortilla chips, all topped with a fried egg. The dish cooled a bit on its journey, so it didn't sizzle as much as we had expected, but our culinary journey from egg to scraping a few shreds of melted cheese off the skillet was definitely worth the trip.

The Hot Iron Breakfast ($10) features skillet-grilled, cubed potatoes -- skin-on, perfectly crisp on the outside and soft on the inside -- with under-grilled onions, all topped with three slices of crisp bacon and a pair of fried eggs. The wealth of potatoes was so great we had to abandon some. And we suggest that the folks in the kitchen add the salt to the concoction before they add the egg; the level of salt to flavor the potatoes and even the bacon was too much for our eggs (ordered over-medium, came out closer to over-hard).

Also worth ordering, though not perfectly executed: So's beignets ($5, an off-menu special), half a dozen irregularly rectangular dough chunks, flavored with a touch of orange zest, coated with a great deal of powdered sugar, garnished with fresh strawberries and served on a bed of a slightly pudding-like dark-chocolate sauce. The beignets also cooled a bit as they traveled, but it's mostly our fault for letting them sit for a couple of minutes -- the bigger ones stayed properly puffy, but smaller ones were flat and a bit bready.

Our service was generally excellent, but at brunch, having only one person on the floor -- a combination waiter/host/bartender -- well, no matter how capable, helpful and competent, and even if he's only covering a handful of tables, that shortchanges all those roles. We experienced minor waits to be seated, to be served, to have drinks refilled, to get our check and to have our payment processed; we observed one party of four, after standing at the door for a couple of minutes without being seated while the waiter was otherwise occupied, turn around and depart.

Weekend on 02/09/2017

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