Sultry & Hep, SpeakEasy’s Vibe Transcends.

SpeakEasy is trying very hard to please two different crowds. It has a real chance as long as it sticks to good food and good music, and as long as both stay as sophisticated as its patrons.

I dropped by on a Friday afternoon to check out the scene and grab some lunch. I was shocked to find myself the only customer in the place - but that could be attributed to the bitter, bitter cold outside. On my waiter’s suggestion, I went for the Shrimp Scampi ($11 at lunch, $16 for dinner). I was rather pleased with the dish. Served up with fantastically well-seasoned black eyed peas and typical kernel corn, the large shrimp were delivered perched upon three slices of crusty toasted bread. One bite and I was in love. The delicious balance of mushrooms, white wine and the tiniest amount of red onion won me over immediately. Serving the shrimp up on toast rather than in a buttery bath allowed the shrimp to breathe and not become chewy, and the “sop” factor of the toast was well appreciated.

Went back with my dining companion for dinner on a Saturday night. The mood was relaxed, with just a few customers at the bar and another couple across the way at a table. Our waitress gave us recommendations and brought us beverages on a short turnaround while we enjoyed the atmosphere.

SpeakEasy has the feel of a good high-end nightclub; it reminds me a whole lot of one of our favorite New Orleans hotspots, the cabaret at Le Chat Noir. The room is dark but with plenty of comfortable seating, including a couple of rather large red couches in the corner. The neat and original bar is embossed with vinyl and LP covers, and capped at the end with a live piano. There are live musical acts on Friday and Saturday nights ranging from classic rock to R&B and soul, and the wait staff is casual but kind. It lacks some things you might expect with a more established business, but that may just be a matter of maturity. After all, that takes time, which SpeakEasy just hasn’t had yet.

On the recommendation of our waitress, we tried the Crab Fondue ($8) and utterly could not find fault. I’ve had the seafood and cheese sort of fondue so many other places have attempted, but SpeakEasy has it so dead-on, it’s almost worth never ordering it again anywhere else. The unassuming bowl of hot dip and platter of baguette fingers held within the very essence of sweet lump crab meat, a delicious Parmesan-and-other-melty-delights cheese blend, and a talented dance going with the buttery-salty-crunchy heft of the baguette pieces. We were thankful when our waitress came to retrieve the dish; I was mere moments from committing an etiquette faux-pas and absorbing the last of the dip clinging to the sides of the bowl with my fingers.

We were quite entertained by the musical selections while waiting for our dinners. French love songs and Doris Day are smattered aurally between layers of Delta blues and R&B dotted trance. The tunes were apparently called up via Yahoo Music to fill the time before the evening performance began. We found the mix eclectic and charming.

Our dinners arrived; I’d asked for the chef to surprise me with whatever he considered to be his best, and was surprised to receive the Chicken Skewers ($7), hunks of grilled chicken and pineapple with a bit of jerk seasoning. They were delicious but absent the cherries mentioned on the menus.

My dining companion was quite pleased with the offering of the Filet Mignon ($19), a gorgonzola sauced and stuffed round of meat that fell apart on touch with the fork. The sauce, while thin, was a nice salty balance to the steak. The day’s vegetable, asparagus, was delicious, and I even thought the starch of the day (red beans and rice) was a nice hearty accompaniment.

We were doing pretty well, but couldn’t turn down dessert once it came. And here’s where we found the true idea of where SpeakEasy is at. I ordered the Pecan Bourbon Pie, while my companion went for the Orange Chocolate Bundt Cake. Now, when I get pie at a restaurant, it usually comes with whipped cream or ice cream or some sort of garnish. This pie was… frankly, flat. But with one taste all was forgiven. The house-made salty crust was so well matched with the sweetness of the darkly scandalous Karo-bourbon filling and the solid bite of the pecans, I couldn’t help but feel both guilty and happy.

My companion’s dessert, though, proved this is indeed a grown-up establishment. The humble slice of cake held within its moist and delicate morsels layer after layer of flavor, some chocolate, some orange and something dark and secret, perhaps a coffee liqueur or Frangelico. It was something that remained a true mystery, one I’d like to investigate further.

The restaurant does sport a small but mighty wine list, with most by-the-glass offerings sliding under the $10 mark. While the kitchen closes at 10 p.m., the bar remains open until the wee hours, and during our visit remained cluttered with casual drinkers and conversation.

SpeakEasy has that sort of an air to it, as if it’s set to be a stage for some great accidental performance ahead. It’ll be interesting to see how that story unfolds.

You’ll find SpeakEasy at 412 Louisiana in downtown Little Rock, open for lunch Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. On Friday and Saturday it’s open from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m., with dinner service from six to ten. And Sunday’s you can visit from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. For more information, call (501) 374-2008.

As published in the January 2010 edition of Emerald City of the South.

Revisiting Facci's.

We all have one, at least one restaurant that we go to not just for the food or the ambiance but for the memories evoked at that location. I’m blessed with several, and Facci’s Italian Ristorante is one. Fortunately, it’s the good food that keeps me coming back just as much as the memories.

I’ve written about the place before… back when I first started blogging about all the cool places I had been. Facci’s used to be the place my husband and I would stop for lunch or dinner when we were in Hot Springs back in our courting years. It’s where we chose to have our first post-nuptual meal together. And… as my friends have jokingly pointed out to me… then the place burned down. You can read all about it over at my Tie Dye Travels review from November 2007.

Thing is, this past year I’ve started this practice on my Facebook fan page, where I reference an Arkansas restaurant each weekday where readers can go find a good meal. And I get to Facci’s, and I look at the entry, and frankly I’m embarrassed. No, it has nothing to do with the food; I still recommend it to everyone who’s heading to Oaklawn or going down for Garvan Woodland Gardens.

It’s because the photos are terrible.

Let’s face it -- when I started Tie Dye Travels I was just a writer with a camera, not a very good camera at that. I snapped shots with no training or experience and just threw them up on the blog. But with time and patience has come a better understanding of how to convey a good dish through photography.

Finding myself in Hot Springs for the opening day of Oaklawn Racing Park, I just had to drop in and do it all over again. And that’s where this really gets funny to me. Because that little blog entry, that two year old posting combining the story of my favorite little Italian gem in Spa City and some truly deplorable shots that resembled those taken by visitors to Scotland out on Loch Ness… was posted ever so proudly in the foyer.

So that’s how I found myself at one of the dark little tables crowded inside the comfortable little house on Central Avenue, scanning the menu and chuckling, trying not to grin too big. Of course, the menu drew back my attention. I almost went for the $3.99 all-you-can-eat spaghetti, but with much running around Oaklawn still to be done, I didn’t want to drag. I ordered mostaccioli and my dining companion chose a sandwich.

We giggled over the menu, its frank descriptions entertaining. Things like “Cheap red wine: It’s red.” Yeah, that sort of thing.

I’d ordered the #2 lunch special -- soup or salad, mostaccioli and tea or coffee for $6.50. I had three choices for soup: Italian wedding, minestrone or cream of mushroom. Well, I just had to give the cream of mushroom a try, since it was housemade. Glad I did. The thick masala-like soup was creamy, but not in that congealed canned soup sort of way. Big hunks of mushroom littered the bowl, and the soup mated perfectly with fresh hot garlic bread.

The bread? Ah, yeah. I went ahead and ordered Foccacia Bread ($1.75) to go along with our lunch. I’m used to foccacia being thick spongy bread with some sort of cheese in it. At Facci’s, it’s a light six inch round, somewhere between a flatbread and a dinner roll, airy and a little salty. It and the garlic bread were served up together with a plate of olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette for dipping, a perfect sweet and tart combination.

My dining companion chose a sandwich for lunch, the Italian Beef ($5.50). Out comes this big hunk of crusty bread stuffed with beef and white cheese, with a steaming bowl of au jus on the side. The sandwich bread was crunchy on the outside and studded with sesame seeds, the interior was soft and steamy, and the au jus was definitely housemade, very savory but not too salty. It was served up with French fries and ketchup, as are all lunch sandwiches.

My mostaccioli came out on a big platter, big tubes of pasta covered in mozzarella cheese and then the thick red sauce and finally a baseball sized meatball on top. The red sauce at Facci’s is very tomato-y, somewhere between a thick relish and a paste in consistency and the sort of clear tomato flavor you only get from homemade. The oregano is evident, but other spices hide behind the tomato like toddlers behind their mother’s skirts, playful yet bashful. The mozzarella is generous and binds the noodles together quite well. A lunch plateful tends to be about twice as much as I need; our hostess made the kind offer to box up half to take home, which I graciously accepted.

A good lunch, indeed, the sort of thing to stick to your ribs when the weather is cold, the sort of food that’ll get you through an afternoon at the races. I’ve already said a lot about the place. It’s that sort of place. I haven’t even delved into the delightful cannoli or my favorite dish on the menu, the Veal Scallopini. Well, I guess I’ll be making another blog entry eventually.

You’ll find Facci’s Italian Ristorante across the street from Oaklawn at 2900 Central Avenue. Their website seems to have passed the way of the dodo, but you can reach them at (501) 623-9049. They’re open 11am to 9pm Monday through Thursday and until ten on Fridays and Saturdays, closed on Sunday. And you can have a good laugh at my expense over that bad photography in the window. That’s all me. I claim it.

Grillin' Up Good Eatin'.

So, you want Greek food. In Conway. Well, you can get what you’re looking for at Blackwood’s Gyros and Grill. But you’d be missing out on a lot of you didn’t pay attention to all the neat stuff the restaurant has to offer.

It’s not a new place -- in fact, I believe it’s been in business about 20 years now. It’s just relatively new to me. My mom and I found the place while driving around one day in May 2009. It looked promising, so we walked on in. Our waitress greeted us with a smile, quick drink service and a lot of suggestions.

We scanned the menu and went for a couple of sandwiches. We decided to try out the spicy Feta dip ($1.95) that was served up with celery sticks. The dip was also a good match for the potato chips, a spicy mix of Cajun seasoning and Feta cheese you can also get as a spread on your sandwich .

Mom went for the signature Blackwood sandwich ($5.45), a Reuben with extras. The corned beef on rye also sported Swiss cheese, grilled onions and tomatoes, and a specialty sauce. You know my thing about Reubens -- I like them, and I’ve discovered a Reuben sandwich listed on more than 90 percent of Arkansas menus, no joke. And I have to tell you -- though I love Reubens, this one was far better. And in case you were asking -- yes, there’s a true Reuben on the menu, too.

I went for the Louisiana Rex ($7.29), a hunk of chicken breast cooked in Cajun spices and served up on a French bread roll with shredded Cheddar cheese and tomatoes with a hefty dash of mayo. Tasty, but not especially hot, which was fine with me.

We decided to share dessert -- and enjoyed Fried Ice Cream ($3.50) -- a deep fried pita topped with a cornflake-dipped and deep-fried ball of vanilla ice cream drizzled with chocolate sauce and strawberries. Oh, man, it was good. I’m glad we only ordered the one, because it was rich. But oh so good.

So, of course we have to go back. And we did. She ordered up a salad and the Roy Allen ($6.49), an Italian sausage link sautéed up with peppers and onions in marinara sauce and topped with marinara on a French sourdough roll. The sandwich was so spicy Mom broke out in a sweat -- spicy, indeed. The salad was pretty decent, too.

Well, you know me. So many people ask me about where to find the best burger… and yes, one of these days I’ll do a post on the best burgers in the state. I’m sure Blackwood’s will qualify. See, there was this mention of the Giant Jerry Double D Burger ($10)… which was just listed as being a two patty giant burger. We order it -- but our waitress, perhaps surprised that anyone would order the monstrosity, put us in for a Giant Jerry D Burger ($6.89), which in itself is still a rather large burger. I didn’t recognize at first that this was a smaller burger… a 12 ounce burger served up on a French roll is pretty big in itself.

Our cook, though, came out and asked us if we really had ordered the Double D. And he whipped it up again, 24 ounces of burger (two long patties), a kitchen sink of condiments and two types of cheese and burger veggies that still managed to seem light compared to the sheer amount of meat on the bun. The only problem with that sort of burger is there’s no really good way to get it into your mouth. It took a lot of smushing, mashing, squeezing, and flattening to get it to oral-consumption size. In the end, I used a fork and didn’t even get halfway through. Thank goodness for little brothers who like burgers… he got our take-home box.

I’d gone for the onion ring upgrade -- a good choice, since the batter and onion were of excellent quality and cooked to a fantastic crisp. Chips come with all sandwiches, French fries are 75 cents extra and onion rings will run you $1.40 as a side.

So, dessert again. Of course we had to try something different. So we ordered up the Choc-Oliver Delight ($3.50), a seven or eight inch square hunk of moist chocolate cake topped with chocolate sauce and Cool Whip (not frosting) and Skor candy bar crumbles. It was good, it was an excellent but not overly sweet balance of cake and cream, and it was too much for the two of us to finish.

Blackwood’s Gyros and Grill is open from 10:30am to 9pm Monday through Saturday. It’s closed Sunday. You’ll find it at 803 Harkrider in Conway -- right by the bank and about a block away from Old Chicago Pizza and Doe’s Eat Place. Give it a try. Phone number is (501) 329-3924. Sorry, no website.