Back in Black's

The first time I bellied up at Black's Bar & Kitchen, I knocked down five $2 happy-hour Miller Lites and maybe a dozen 50-cent oysters. I was 19 years old, looked about 15 and my ID said I was 26. They’d just taken over from the Gulf Coast Kitchen and hadn’t built up any sort of client base; the bar was deserted and I probably would have gotten served without the fake.

For the next four or five or six years, Black’s was our bar. I must have drunk a pool full of beer and knocked back a couple oil drums of Grand Marnier. I saw fights, fires, bartenders pass out on the bar and my friends pass out under it.

The bar food was incredible. The juicy burgers anyway-you-want with shoestring fries (half-price on Mondays), the sweet, smoky pulled duck quesadilla and the rich, garlicky bowl of mussels were all standouts. It was cheap, too, and the food all came from the same place as the $30 entrees served in the dining room.

Black’s closed for renovations on Valentine’s Day ’06. The bar staff didn’t mince words – this was the end of Miller Lite and Cheeseburger Mondays, the end of Black’s as we knew it.

They reopened a few months ago, but I didn’t have a meal there until my father and I grabbed a later dinner there Tuesday. The façade says it all – the black-and-white, hand-lettered sign has turned into industrial steel letters glowing red and the rickety deck where we smoked cigarettes on wrought iron patio furniture has become flagstone with a two-story, copper-colored fountain. The funky, rollicking bar has become warm and modern and spare, where martini drinking 30-somethings are served by unfamiliar faces. When the Maitre’d asked whether we’d like to eat in the bar or the dining room, the choice was easy. The new dining room is lovely.