Slow Club, the Dorian Gray of Restaurants

The Nickster/Flickr

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Part of a series about restaurants that have been around so long they've slipped into a media black hole.

It's been 19 years since Erin Rooney's Slow Club opened, and when I visited last week, it seemed populated with the same customers ― not the exact ones, of course, but their 2010 cognates. By the looks of them, they're architects and Web designers, the kind of people who spend the weekend traipsing from the farmers' market to a performance at the YBCA, chatting on their phones about Jonathan Franzen's new novel and their upcoming trip to the Croatia coast. They own beautiful furniture. They pop by the Slow Club for drinks and weeknight dinner.

Perhaps because there were so many of the professionally stylish about ― the most sloppily dressed people in the room were the waiters ― the Slow Club showed no sign of age. The mottled gray walls and exposed metal beams still felt au courant, and if there were scuffs and chips they were hidden by the dim lighting. Could be the restaurant is swabbed in Oil of Olay every night.

So: Great vibe. Good cocktails ― bartender-approved classics like the aviation and the pisco sour. Good ingredients on the menu, as farm-focused and seasonal as the city requires. (There were enough heirloom tomatoes listed to make me wonder if the chef owns a stake in a tomato farm.) My meal began with thumbnail-sized padròn peppers, heat-blistered, shiny with oil, speckled with grains of salt that crackled between my teeth as I bit down. It continued with a salad of feathery arugula with fried hazelnuts and cubes of melon. All in step with the times.

The entrees came ― and suddenly it was if a hot oven time machine had flung us back to the early 1990s. It took me a while to figure out what about the cooking reminded me so strongly of the years when the Slow Club was young. Was it the firmness of the grilled pork loin, a giant hunk of meat sliced in half to display it was cooked well past medium, or the fact that the pork was plopped, dry, onto polenta, with an incongruous, underseasoned stuffed tomato on the side? Was it the potato gnocchi drowning in an acidic tomato sauce (heirloom, of course)? Both the blocky, casual assembly of the entrees and the not-quite-together technique reminded me of the era when this city was delving into farm-to-table cooking but our wobbly culinary skills weren't always up to the challenge.

My tablemate and I seemed to be the only people bothered by the incongruity. The branding consultants and industrial designers around us leaned forward over their tables, flushed with cocktails and candlelight. It was a lovely scene, the Slow Club, just not as timeless as I initially hoped.

Slow Club: 2501 Mariposa (at Hampshire), 241-9390.