The crowds mean long table waits and improvised communal seating arrangements in the bar area that make more sense to haggard hostesses than paying guests. The place is nearly always packed-as a restaurant whose name guarantees booze and pastry is bound to be. Just like my buddy at the bar, I was ultimately won over.įortunately for Whiskey Cake, the restaurant rarely has to deal with skeptics like my curmudgeonly bar neighbor and me. I didn't eat or drink anything there that I'd classify as exceptional, but I found the vast majority of food satisfying. That appears to be largely true, although our server told us the kitchen couldn't take credit for the ketchup and a few other accoutrements the restaurant's wisely outsourced its breads to Empire Baking Co.Ĭonsidering the scope of its ambitions, Whiskey Cake does an admirable job. As servers are quick to tell their guests-even the ones who answer the standard "Have you dined with us before?" greeting in the affirmative-that Whiskey Cake makes everything from scratch. Still, I wondered if a restaurant with such a distinctly corporate vibe could make good on its locavore promise. Which doesn't mean the brick-walled warehouse of a room isn't impressive: The high ceiling and crook-necked double lamps on the bar give the restaurant the feel of a history museum's Gilded Age streetscape, minus the barber shop. The room partitions made from neat stacks of logs, the cow pictures in the entry breezeway, the wingback chairs in the scattered lounge areas and the clear Edison bulbs suspended from cables don't point to any individual personality. The restaurant seems so franchise-ready that I was surprised there wasn't a sales office out front. I know, because I wasn't sure I'd like it either. By the time I was called to a table, he seemed to have taken the restaurant off his long list of scorn-worthy targets. He loved it, and was equally taken by one of my deviled eggs, a trough of firm egg white heaped with a mustardy filling and garnished with translucent curlicues of salty gravlax. Like most of the drinkers who'd managed to snare a bar stool that night, he didn't have any intention of ordering a fancy-schmancy cocktail, especially one made with brown liquor.īut he needed something to pad his belly for more beer-drinking, so he and a friend went halfsies on a platter of cheeses and house-cured meats. He was pained by the shootings in Tucson, because the tragedy could cost a deserving astronaut the chance to go to space, and was appalled by Obama's Marxist tendencies. Over the course of two cocktails, I learned he liked beer, guns and tax cuts. My bar neighbor didn't strike me as the barbecue banh mi type. "This place used to be better," grumbled a former Plano Tavern regular sitting alongside me at the crescent-shaped bar. Looking for Plano Tavern's chili con queso or fried calamari? Afraid you'll have to make do with hummus plated with wedges of grilled pita and blistered oven-roasted tomatoes, or perhaps the Texas blue crab cakes. The cracks and snaps that soon thereafter reverberated through the room were the sounds of those old-timers whipping their necks around at the sight of the new restaurant's savvy menu of trendy pub grub. It wasn't designed for the beer-drinking traditionalists who used to swig frosted mugs of Miller Lite at the Plano Tavern, which previously occupied the building.īut when Whiskey Cake opened, Tavern vets flocked to it, grateful to have their neighborhood bar back. Whiskey Cake, the impressively thought-out pub by the Tollway in Plano, was designed for drinkers who don't laugh when their bartenders spritz their cocktails with atomized oils and diners who don't berate their servers when they learn their lukewarm tomato soup isn't eligible for a quick nuke, because the kitchen doesn't have a microwave.
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