Big Whiskey

Chef Jose Garces' latest could not be more un-Garces-like.

by Trey Popp

Jessica Kourkounis ON BOARDS: Gruyere cheese puffs served in a mini cast-iron skillet and truffled, pickled artichokes are two stellar snacks at Jose Garces' Village Whiskey.

[ review ]

A two-hour wait for a seat at a bar serving $11 cocktails, a $24 burger and whiskey priced as high as $42 an ounce? In Philadelphia, it can only mean one thing: Jose Garces has opened another spot in a city that can’t get enough of him. The man behind Amada, Tinto, Distrito and Chifa, who skipped the last James Beard Awards to tape The Next Iron Chef, is carving out another piece of Center City while his cleaver is sharp. He's also taking a step away from his strong suit. With Village Whiskey, he leaves the Spanish-speaking world behind for a bourbon-spiked amalgam of Swing Era ambience and Southern comfort food.

It could not be more different from its predecessors. Village Whiskey bears virtually no trace of Garces' sensibility as a chef, but his mastery of restaurant stagecraft has never been more apparent. The wood-paneled vestibule might as well be a time machine. On the other side, Venetian blinds with deep mahogany-stained slats split the street lamp's glow into a wide-wale corduroy of darkness and light. Billie Holiday purrs to the strains of the Basie band. Brown fan blades whir in wire-cage fixtures above bar-height black-leather banquets. If baseball sluggers still traveled in rail cars, this is where they'd wait for the night train, swatting away the questions of some newspaperman holding a typewriter case and a lowball of warm rye.

They would also know to order a burger. Even the $9 version is among the best in a town with a lot of good ones. Village sources beef from "sustainable farm-raised" cattle in Maine and grinds it themselves, allowing for a loosely packed half-pound patty that gushes with juiciness. Of course the $24 specimen is what's gotten the most attention. The main upcharge derives from its crown of seared foie gras, but that's one thing a burger outfitted with thick slabs of smoky bacon, maple-glazed cipollini onions and a mound of Rogue smoky blue cheese doesn't really need. If I had it to do over again, I'd nix the organs and let that unholy trinity of sweetness and pork fat and mold work its own dark miracle. Even just the cheese itself — which is cold-smoked over hazelnut shells and tastes faintly of toffee — would make for a decadent lunch.

For dinner, treat yourself to a mound of horseradish crab salad under the bun, and some sliced avocado. Honestly, there's not much sense straying from the Angus in this place. I liked my "Kentucky fried quail," which was salty and tender and gone in a flash, but it's a wee little tweeter for $14, and neither the limp biscuit nor the pasty sweet potato-and-corn succotash that came with it were worth seconds. Nor were the duck-fat fries that peeked over the silvery rim of a julep cup. Their thick-cut interiors seemed to have been cooked less by hot fat than by their own trapped steam, and were consequently too bland for even a good house-made ketchup to rescue. And judging from the S'more dessert, which killed a good chocolate ganache with oversweet marshmallow and chewy, crunchless homemade graham crackers, a liquid nightcap is a better night's end.

Village Whiskey's kitchen doesn't exercise anything close to the control that typifies Garces' small-plates flagships, but in a way, that looseness is part of its appeal — right along with the dish-towel napkins and the unbleached two-ply hanging next to the john. When Tinto opened in the space next door back in 2007, its menu listed 45 sous chefs, line cooks and the like. You could hardly escape the sense that every morsel had been sculpted and labored over by who-knew-how-many hands. That worked back in the days when real estate could only go up. But in what The Economist dubbed a "joyless recovery," casual comfort is king, and that's what Village Whiskey delivers. Deviled eggs and tater tots for three bucks. Warm cheese puffs lodged in a cast-iron skillet under a gossamer web of melted Gruyere. The most memorable thing I ate here did fall on the more decadent side — pickled artichokes spiked with real shaved truffles, with a ramekin of whipped ricotta to soften the acidity's edge — but even that dish, whose fungal depth charges exploded with the intensity that synthetic truffle oil so often obliterates in an overbearing shower of perfume, arrived in a down-home half-pint Mason jar.

Anyway, Village Whiskey is a bar with a kitchen, not the other way around. And the cocktails are fabulous. My favorite old standard was a boozy but supremely well-balanced Vieux Carre, whose rye still glimmered through the sweet vermouth and brandy. The inspired De Rigueur, which shakes together rye and grapefruit juice with mint leaves and Aperol, is one of the best newcomers to hit Philadelphia since APO kicked our mixology into overdrive. Of all the bartending innovation we've seen here, this is one newfangled drink I might just start requesting all over town, just to ensure its survival.

That's bound to be a losing strategy when it comes to VW's brown-liquor offerings, which rise 10 feet off the ground behind the long bar. There are more than 80 bourbons, ryes, single-malt Scotches and Irish whiskeys. Many of them are impossible to buy in Pennsylvania. Some would be a pain to find anywhere. But for me, this was where Village Whiskey went off the rails, because the markups are punishing to the point of bafflement.

From top shelf to bottom, VW's whiskeys sell for about five times their retail price. Considering that whiskey doesn't suffer with age or require refrigeration, it's hard for me to imagine what could justify such steep premiums. VW sells an ounce of Pappy Van Winkle 23-year for $42. Char No. 4, a whiskey bar in Brooklyn, charges $17. The same holds at the opposite end of the spectrum. Virginia Gentleman runs $2 an ounce at Char No. 4, but $5 here. Even with an expense account to abuse, I couldn't get past it. It may be a great place to look at fancy bottles, but it is not a good place to actually explore them.

Nevertheless, Garces' remix of jazz-era stylishness and Kentucky-fried comfort is a deeply soothing place to linger, and one whose burgers and cocktails and smoldering trumpet riffs are already beckoning me back.

(t_popp@citypaper.net)

Village Whiskey | 118 S. 20th St., 215-665-1088, villagewhiskey.com. Mon.-Thu., 11:30 a.m.-mid.; Fri.-Sat., 11:30 a.m.-1 a.m.; Sun., 5 p.m.-mid. Bar snacks, raw bar, salads, fries, $1.50-$15; pickled items, $4-$12; burgers and sandwiches, $9-$28. Reservations not accepted. Wheelchair accessible.