Audio By Carbonatix
If nothing else, Rear Window is a view or, rather, a collection of little views tucked away in portals wrought into the interior architecture. The effect is handsome, cozy, plush, and off-center.
Rear Window is neatly divided into two sections–restaurant and bar–separated by a wood-paneled wall harboring a number of rectangular cutouts and square nooks. Inside these crevices are a variety of glass sculptures, some looking like sea creatures, others resembling drops of black ink grabbed in mid-splat with displaced ink stretching into blunted BB-tipped arms. All of these specimens are lit with lights that change hue.
But this isn’t the only coziness working its way through Rear Window. The dining area is puffed and plushed with more paneling and cushy upholstered banquettes above which hang black-and-white photos of nudes posed to resemble salad vegetables. Both the dining area and the bar are well appointed, which means that a television screen locks on to your sight line no matter how you turn your head.
A Rear Window press release describes the food as “comfort food for both snacking and dining,” which perhaps raises images of liver and onions, macaroni and cheese, cocktail weenies, and smoked oysters stabbed with toothpicks dyed in golf-fashion hues. Instead, what you find is…pizza, that ubiquitous substance by which you can turn dough balls and Contadina into works of culinary art simply by adding snails and cheese that smells like a pile of post-game hockey equipment. Rear Window offers a basic pizza girded on a sheet of lahvosh that you can outfit from a list of ingredients–everything from Canadian bacon to pineapple–for a buck per topping. We threw an assortment of black and green olives, artichokes, and Italian sausage on ours. It was pleasant enough I suppose, firm and structurally sound with lots of gooey cheese. Yet it wasn’t the goo that provided the hockey aroma, but the sausage that wafted a pronounced sour fume. Still, once you got past the near stench, the pizza was pretty good.
Even better than the pizza was the bruschetta, grilled sections of Italian bread heaped with diced tomato, garlic, basil, and a scattering of pine nuts. Not only did this bread hors d’oeuvre come off with verve, it rippled with a certain earthiness drawn from those nuts–a good balance. Balance was not the hallmark, however, of the Greek salad. It was a fairly respectable mix of greens, feta crumbles, tomato, black olives (no kalamata?), cucumbers, red onions, and…croutons. Croutons? The whole thing, croutons and all, was washed in a dressing that was distressingly lemony, turning each bite into a neat little fit of mouth-puckering.
But no matter how you dress them up, where bars really tend to shine (other than the moon kind) is with meat, whether it be flying buffalo parts, fried pork hides or ground beef. Rear Window’s hamburger was a thing of bar beauty: stiff and charred on the outside, tender on the inside with rich flavor and juice that glazed the chin like baby drool. Though golden on the outside, the steak fries worked in the mouth like a dry stiff cake.
Yet the onion rings were husky hellions, big, thick, chewy, golden, and crisp–and so greasy that these loops sheened the fingers and puddled the paper liner at the bottom of the basket.
Service was friendly and polite, but a little rough around the edges–hurried, that is. We had to request salt and pepper shakers after our entrées arrived, the ones with the side basket of onion rings. The whole thing was more bar-like than restaurant like, as though it were geared toward drinks and refills more than pasta and steak. I half expected my herb-olive oil-marinated New York strip steak to come with a swizzle stick and an olive instead of medium rare.
But it didn’t. It didn’t arrive pink either. Instead, it emerged as a mottled stripe of gray next to a lettuce leaf on top of which were two tomato slices blustered with salt and pepper. The steak was fine, though it was ill textured with stringy edges and mealy patches. Yet it transformed into the most deliciously juicy piece of aged prime flesh if you repeated “God, this cost only $6.95” while you yearned for the server to bring a toothpick or maybe some dental floss.
Penne marinara proved somewhat of an effortful chew as well, with scraps of chicken that were scorched and dry. But the thick chunky marinara sauce clinging to the penne tubes was robust.
Rear window was drafted by former Fairmont Hotel Beverage Manager Jack Freehan, who put the restaurant/bar in the “happening location” that used to house Crazy Charlie’s, Virago, and O’Leary’s before their bellies went up. Maybe it takes a view from the rear to survive.
