Lincoln Park’s Fado Pub is a good bet
01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, March 15, 2007
Guinness on tap is just one of several Irish brews available.
LINCOLN — This St. Patrick’s Day you can have dinner in an 1890s Dublin pub without having to travel farther than Lincoln Park.
Fado Irish Pub is the new restaurant at the once down-at-the-heels, now on-the-glitzy-upswing dog track, to be joined later this month by three other dining establishments. Step out of the clinking, jingling, jangling carnival atmosphere of the second-floor slot machine room, walk down a subdued wood-paneled hallway and suddenly you’re in the Emerald Isle, in an expansive place whose centerpiece is a gargantuan octagonal bar brought over from the Old Sod.
The place is huge, yet has plenty of out-of-the-way nooks and crannies set on more than one level, to make it surprisingly homey. Many of those nooks seem perfect spots for meeting friends and enjoying a pint of Guinness, one of the several Irish brews on draft. Adding to the ambiance are all the dark wood details — paneling, tables, padded benches, bookcases (also brought over from Ireland, our personable waiter, Dave, told us) — plus an intricately designed tile floor, chandeliers that look as though they could just as easily be gas as electric, and paintings of stately greyhounds lining the walls . . . appropriate, because some tables overlook the greyhound track.
Look in one direction and you almost expect to find James Joyce sitting at the bar. Look in the other and you’re back in Lincoln with a pack of dogs in hot pursuit of a mechanical bunny.
Manager George Grande said in a follow-up phone conversation that the bar, the bookcases, the walls and all the other details of Fado had been built in Ireland, then taken apart and reconstructed piece by piece at Lincoln.
Fado may sound more Portugal than Ireland, but Dave assured us that it’s a Gaelic word, pronounced “fah-DOUGH,” meaning long, long ago. “Many Irish stories begin with ‘Fado, fado,’ much like the way our own stories begin with, ‘Once upon a time,’ ” he said.
Gaelic, in fact, accompanies the English headings on the menu or, if you prefer, the biachlar. You might start with an appetizer (bealoga), perhaps move on to a salad (sailead), a sandwich (ceapaire) or an entrée of Irish traditional fare (bia traidisiunta), then finish off your meal with a dessert (milseog).
But before we got to all that, several minutes were taken up trying to find a table far from the exceptionally loud singer-pianist whose voice was magnified in the echoey room.
We frowned on the hostess’s first choice, one of those high tables where your feet dangle from tall chairs. The second choice, down a few steps from the bar, seemed very noisy. Another, in an alcove behind the piano man, seemed off the beaten path and still very noisy. So, back to the second table we went, with a little seat adjustment to get my eyes out of the glare of the bright lights that hang over the dog-track grandstand on the other side of the window.
It wasn’t long before the piano man took a long break. Bliss. But he would be back in a little while for Wednesday’s weekly Quiz Night contest, which would catch just about everyone in the restaurant in its brain-teaser questions, even me, the one who had at first dismissed such folderol.
But first, a drink (ol). Yes, there are several selections of Irish whiskey at Fado, plus Scotch whisky, single malts, wine and bottled beer. But the ambience seemed to call for draft beers. And so my dining companion ordered a Harp lager (with a strong hops flavor) while I chose a Smithwick’s Ale (pronounced “Smitticks,” Dave told us). A dark brew that is Ireland’s oldest ale, it had a hearty, robust taste.
Appetizers at Fado are a mix of the familiar (crab dip with baguette bread, chicken tenders, cheese dip) and things with a touch of Ireland (Galway Bay mussels, potato and leek soup, rasher and Cheddar toastie) plus some that combine the Old World with the New (chicken boxty quesadillas).
A boxty, the menu explained, “is a gently seasoned potato pancake stuffed with special ingredients and cooked on a griddle.” In the quesadilla’s case, it was stuffed with traditional quesadilla fixings: grilled chicken, melted pepper jack cheese, diced tomato, drizzled with a red chili aioli and served with tomato pico, sour cream and salsa on the side.
The rasher and Cheddar toastie ($6.75) was a variation on a toasted cheese sandwich — deliciously creamy melted white Cheddar with a rasher of Irish bacon (like thin-sliced Canadian bacon) on toasted sourdough bread. It had a wonderfully rich flavor, bringing back memories of Mom’s kitchen. On the side were thick-cut French fries (chips) that were fat and moist, yet not at all greasy.
We toyed with ordering the Smithwick’s mini burgers ($9.95) — ground beef marinated in the ale and served with pickles, grilled onions and American cheese on potato rolls — but eventually decided that it sounded a little too Fourth of July. So we opted for the Guinness BBQ wings ($9.95), which seemed the best of both worlds.
I’m not a fan of chicken wings, but one taste and I eagerly dove into the hefty serving, which included half a dozen wings and a half-dozen meaty drumsticks. They were covered in a deliciously sweetish, sticky Guinness-based barbecue sauce, with a side of celery sticks and a blue cheese dressing that had big chunks of blue cheese swimming in it. The dressing proved the perfect tangy flavor to offset the barbecue sauce.
For an entrée, I couldn’t pass up the corned beef and cabbage, and you couldn’t do better in taste, in size and in price ($12.95). I couldn’t believe the high mound of tasty, tender, lean corned beef that was on the plate and dug down to see, perhaps, if there were some filler stuffed underneath to make it look like so much. But no. What you see is what you get . . . and you get a lot, enough for two hungry adults and a child, at least if anyone under 18 were allowed inside Lincoln Park, which they are not.
A friend who’d preceded us here had been shocked that the cabbage was covered with a butter sauce. But the butter added a bright touch to the shredded cabbage, which had been cooked just a touch to soften it, then sautéed to crisp tenderness. (“We serve authentic Irish food, but with a twist of other cultures,” said Grande.) Also on the plate, four good-sized and fork-tender red potatoes. This dish alone could bring thoughts of leprechauns and shillelaghs.
My dining companion, meanwhile, chose the Trinity Boxty ($13.95). Delicious it was, if not exactly lovely, being a sort of large turnover made of potato flour, stuffed with slices of grilled steak, sautéed mushrooms and onions, then smothered in a rich, creamy, heady brown gravy whose ingredients included whiskey and garlic.
To counter all that brown, tender asparagus spears were on the plate. They had an odd, sweet taste, reminiscent of flower petals. I sampled two and thought them very tasty, although my dining companion was not impressed and abandoned most of them.
For dessert, there was a limited house-made selection. The Black & Tan Brownie ($6.25) was a big, warm, wonderfully fudgy brownie with chopped pecans on the side, all topped by a huge scoop of “Guinness ice cream” drizzled with chocolate and caramel sauces. Grande said the kitchen takes ice cream and mixes it with a touch of Guinness beer to make it something all their own. It was decadently good to the last bite.
Also winning raves from my companion was the bread pudding ($6.25), a moist, custardy slice baked with apples, cinnamon, sugar and chopped walnuts, topped with a whiskey sauce and a great big scoop of ice cream. My friend paired it with a warm mug of Irish coffee ($6.25), made with Bushmills Irish whiskey, brown sugar, a dollop of whipped cream and cinnamon swirls in the pattern that appears on the Fado logo.
Grande said that there are other Fado restaurants in the United States, but each one has a distinctive look all its own, so he doesn’t consider it a chain but a small group of pubs. (The Fado at Lincoln Park, Dave said, is called the Victorian, for its style.) It is owned by Lincoln Park.
Even for non-gamblers this is a fun place, made more fun on the recent Wednesday we were there because it turned out to be “Quiz Night,” with prizes awarded to customers who had the most right answers to a scattershot mix of questions asked in several rounds by the piano player.
We left happy, and didn’t drop a coin into a single slot machine, although my companion was enthused to find some nickel slots in the place. That might wait for another time, for we’ll surely be back at Fado and won’t wait for St. Patrick’s Day to come around again.
We’ll also want to try the other new restaurants coming soon to Lincoln Park. Opening March 23 will be the 340-seat Twin Hearth, described by spokeswoman Cynthia Stern as a “live action buffet — no steam tables; the chefs will be cooking in front of you” — and a 240-seat steakhouse, although she couldn’t release the name of it at press time. On March 27 there will be Carmine’s, a 580-seat Italian family-style restaurant patterned after the one in New York City.
A dinner for two at Fado Irish Pub at Lincoln Park might look like this:
Harp lager…$5.75
Smithwick’s ale…$5.75
Toastie rasher…$6.75
Trinity boxty…$13.95
Corned beef and cabbage…$12.95
Black & Tan Brownie…$6.25
Irish coffee…$6.25
Total food and drink…$57.65
Tax…$4.61
Tip…$11.50
Total bill…$73.76
Fado Irish Pub at Lincoln Park, 100 Twin River Rd., Lincoln, (401) 723-3200, www.lincolnparkri.com/dining. Dressy casual. No reservations. No one under 18 admitted. Wheelchair accessible. Free valet parking or self park in lot with shuttle bus service. AE, D, DC, MC, V. All-day menu served Monday to Friday 11 a.m. to 12:30 a.m.; Saturday 10 a.m. to 12:30 a.m.; Sunday noon to 12:30 a.m. Appetizers $4.25 to $9.95; salads and sandwiches $5.95 to $12.95; entrees $10.95 to $15.95; desserts $5.25 to $6.25. Extensive Irish whiskey and beer list, with wines $6 to $13 by the glass; $20 to $42 for a bottle.
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