Bar Food

After opening Dalesio's, the restaurant in Little Italy that brought spa cuisine to Baltimore, Michael Dalesio went on to become one of the area's best-known restaurant consultants. He likes his current project so much, he says, he's become a part owner.The restaurant is Sebastian's (566A Ritchie Highway, Severna Park, 410-544-4705). It features the regional Italian food Dalesio is known for, plus steaks and seafood. Entrees range from $6.75 to $19.95.Before it became Sebastian's a couple of months ago, the place was a bar-restaurant, so the menu continues to feature bar food to keep the old customers happy.

Remember that scene in "Crocodile Dundee" where Dundee fixes an authentic Australian meal for the woman (blackened alligator on a spit, yams, grilled slugs) and then says something like, "Actually, that stuff tastes terrible" and opens a can of chili for himself?Well, you won't want to open a can of chili if you try the authentically ethnic food at Boomerang, Baltimore's new Australian pub. But you might want to order instead the Port Philip Bay fillet, a tender piece of beef as big as your fist, topped with fried oysters and a creamy red-pepper sauce.

Sebastian's tries to be all things to all eaters, and does a pretty good job of it.This Severna Park bar-restaurant, until recently the Gingerbread Man, is Michael Dalesio's newest. He's the restaurateur who opened Dalesio's in Little Italy, went on to run the dining room on the top of the Brookshire Hotel for a while, and was involved with Ransome's Harbor Hill Cafe in South Baltimore. He likes to open restaurants and then move on to the next project.dTC Now he's general manager of Sebastian's.

Canton may be the hottest place in town for good casual eating spots -- from Amicci's to the Wild Mushroom.The newest is the Claddagh Pub, which opened at the beginning the summer. It's a pleasant little bar-restaurant, fresh and cheerful with a green and white color scheme and Irish murals and motifs. You have the Orioles on the TV, R.E.M. on the sound system and a tender, juicy Black Angus steak in front of you.Of course, you can get sandwiches and bar food here. The shrimp, freshly steamed with onions and spices, are so big you have to eat them before they eat you. Onion straws are crisply fried and come with an incendiary Cajun sauce for dipping.

A jewel of a loungeA hamburger at Donna's? Yes, now that the Mount Vernon restaurant has become the Ruby Lounge. The space across the hall from Donna's Coffee Bar has been transformed into a sophisticated bistro, if that's not a contradiction in terms -- still stylish but more informal and more comfortable. The lively menu is "inspired by local ethnic markets," says owner Donna Crivello. (With a hamburger and french fries thrown in for good measure.)"The emphasis is on 'lounge,' a place to meet friends, relax, have a drink and some great food," adds co-owner Alan Hirsch.

This time of year, the Hopkins campus is where it's happening, from lacrosse games to the big spring fair at the end of April. And P. J.'s Pub across Charles Street is where a lot of beer drinking is happening.P. J.'s has 13 beers on draft, plus a large selection of imported bottled beers. What it also has, even though you don't hear much about it, is some pretty decent bar food.The basement bar-dining room offers more atmosphere than you might expect. P. J.'s is a college hangout, but one with some history behind it. It looks settled in, comfortable, substantial.

The Jean-Louis Palladin of bar food in Baltimore used to be the anonymous cook who made the oversized cheeseburger at Alonso's. But if you think today's bar food is only wings, potato skins and the like, you've got a treat coming. When you're bored with hamburgers, try the grilled portobello mushroom sandwich at the Wild Mushroom or the crab omelet at Jeannier's.Jeannier's? you say. Isn't that a French restaurant? It is, but it has a bar with a separate menu, more casual and less expensive.

There is bar food, and then there is bar food. Jeannier's serves the second kind.The first kind is nachos and wings and burgers with fries. The other is onion soup gratinee made with a delicious homemade broth, crab omelets and a sirloin steak sandwich. With oeufs a la neige (floating island) for dessert.Jeannier's is predominantly a traditional French, special-night-out restaurant located in an apartment house, with all the interior-design excitement that an apartment house dining room usually generates.

Although there's nothing you love as much as a fat, briny oyster on the half shell straight from the sea, you've gotten a little nervous about raw shellfish lately. Oysters Rockefeller are good, but sometimes the oysters get lost among the spinach and Pernod. What to do?Well, you might try the baked oysters casino at Michael's Cafe, Raw Bar and Grill. It's an unorthodox treatment, but the kitchen resists loading down these plump beauties with bread crumbs. Each has a bit of crisp bacon and seasoned butter and is baked just long enough.

Not many restaurants could get a friend of mine to sing her order for a free beer. (After all, I'm footing the bill anyway.) So give Fins credit: From the moment you walk into this four-story tribute to Margaritaville, you can't help but fall under the spell. You are forced to have a good time.Maybe it's the freshly renovated interior, the tropical decor of this Jimmy Buffet beach bar. Or maybe it's the jaunty island music that gets you in the mood. It might even be the relentless good humor of the menu, from the clams "Come Monday" casino to "This is the burger your parents warned you about."

These days it's cause to celebrate when a restaurant more ambitious than a pub or pizza place opens in Baltimore. Scary times usually produce eateries that offer sure bets in the way of food - sure bets that don't cost much. When I first heard about the Reserve (1542 Light St., TheReserveBaltimore.com), a new Federal Hill bar, I figured when it got around to serving food, the kitchen would produce the usual nachos, wings and burgers. Instead, the offerings include tuna tataki, shrimp and tropical fruit ceviche, cornmeal-crusted red grouper in a smoked salmon caper beurre blanc, Buffalo strip steak with parsnip puree and pan-roasted boneless quail.

Is there a chef in the world who doesn't want to open his or her own restaurant? I doubt it. I can understand why someone would want total creative control, but the challenges of being an owner, particularly in a recession, on top of having to produce the food must be daunting. But chefs continue to do it. One of the latest is Antoine Petteway, who had a loyal following when he worked at the Metropolitan, a couple of blocks from the location of his new place, the Hill. He's managed to stay on good terms with his former employers, which says something about the kind of person he is. Petteway, I gather, is a major draw for the Hill.

First impressions can be misleading. Especially if your preconceived notions are misleading. My preconceived notions of the new Frank & Nic's near Oriole Park at Camden Yards had to do with the talk I had with one of the owners, Frank Zafonte. Somehow Frank & Nic's sounded like a swanky lounge when he described it, with booths and granite-topped bars and a burgundy-and-gold color scheme. Zafonte mentioned the black-and-white photos of Baltimore, but he didn't mention the huge flat-screen TV that hangs over the main dining room.

Hamilton Tavern is the noisiest restaurant I've ever eaten in. OK, maybe not noisier than RA Sushi with its loud rock and roll, but for a restaurant where no music is playing, it was the noisiest. Blame the handsome decor: the hardwood floors, the pressed-tin ceilings, the bare benches and tables, the interesting farm implements that are an integral part of the split-level dining room. (You open the front door with a wooden scythe handle.) No TVs, thank goodness, to add to the chaos. It's a great room with a built-in patina, only it's loud.

This Top 10 Tuesday, dive bars with good pub grub, is a joint effort of readers of Dining@Large, Sun reviewers and me. Note that these aren't dive bars in the negative sense, but they are all a little funkier than neighborhood taverns. The list is in alphabetical order. 1 Bertha's in Fells Point: In spite of the afternoon tea, the live music and the famous mussels, it still has some of the good dive-bar elements. 2 Daniel's on Route 1 in Elkridge: Bikers' dive extraordinaire; all the food is good.

If you think the new Yellow Dog Tavern (700 S. Potomac St., 410-342-0280) sounds like another in a long list of places in Canton that specializes in bar food, you'd be wrong. Co-owner and head chef Anita Scheiding describes the fare as "home-cooked, casual fine dining." The new owners converted the space where Mike's Happy Hour bar used to be into a two-story restaurant with a "casual upscale environment." In other words, don't dress up; but don't expect Buffalo wings either. Dinner entrees range from a vegetarian platter for $9.99 to roasted sea bass with mushrooms and a tequila-lime sauce for $24.99.

Some places do exactly what they set out to do, and for that you have to give them credit. Others even do a bit more than you expect, which is the case of Power Plant Live's newest bar, Mex. Notice I said bar, not restaurant. Anyone going there who expects a full-fledged Mexican restaurant will be disappointed. I decided to review Mex anyway, because Power Plant Live is such a high profile part of the downtown scene, but I didn't expect any more than the "chow" that its Web site, mexbaltimore.

He wants mozzarella sticks, a burger and fries with his draft. She prefers a meal with more sophistication and fewer calories. She wouldn't mind a wine-by-the-glass suggestion, either. That's the restaurant Clayton's Tavern, which opened recently in Federal Hill, wants to be; and for the most part, it succeeds. The drawing card is the fact that bar food is on the menu with new American dishes such as salmon au poivre with a splash of Grand Marnier, glazed hearts of palm and horseradish mashed potatoes.

Neo Viccino is the old Viccino Bistro's solution to the problem most of the restaurants in the Mount Vernon cultural district face: How do you fill the tables when the theaters and concert halls are dark? In spite of its funky location and bistro label, Viccino's was basically a fine-dining, traditionally Italian restaurant when it opened a decade ago. The chef was Christopher Cherry, who had worked at Tabrizi's and the Polo Grill. The food changed somewhat over the years, but it was still a bistro in name only.

In my experience, restaurants don't get better with age once the shakedown period is over. If they are a success, management is careful not to change things much. If they aren't, all sorts of desperate measures are taken to try to attract customers. At best, they find a lowest common denominator. At worse, they die a slow death. OK, that's a gross generalization, and along comes BlueStone to prove me wrong. When it opened three years ago, it immediately became a Timonium hotspot. The food wasn't bad, but BlueStone was first and foremost a very successful bar. There was not one quiet corner in the huge (10,000-square-foot)