Cox: Jack and Tony’s Restaurant and Whisky Bar

The brick-walled bar on the east side of the business is partitioned from the restaurant on the west side, although the bar crowd’s hubbub and the delta and East Texas-style blues playing on the sound system filter into the dining area. While the bar can be crowded, the dining area is not so much. One reason may be that the food, while consistently good on two visits, isn’t very exciting.

Orange-glazed beet and goat cheese salad

Take the Blackened Prawns with Creole Remoulade ($10 ** ½). Five small prawns are smudged with a spicy blackening mix and served with a dollop of creamy remoulade. But the prawns hardly make a decent mouthful and the flavors are just shy of lively. And the best things about the Orange-Glazed Roasted Beets ($8 **) are the dabs of Laura Chenel goat cheese and the bitter chicory frisee. The beets themselves, red and golden chunks, don’t bring much beet or orange flavor to the dish and seem bored to be there.

House-Cured Gravlax ($6 ** ½) tasted mostly of salt and the pinch of minced dill weed used to edge the thin slice of fish, but had enough salmon flavor to earn that extra half-star. The cured salmon sat atop a bit of egg salad on a crostini. The dish was garnished with two small pieces of frisee and just one piece of radicchio chiffonade.

These dishes give the impression that the kitchen is trying, but not hard enough. For instance, three Bacon-Wrapped Scallops ($11 **) should have sung with the smoky bacon flavor and sweet shellfish nuggets, but their subdued flavor was more like a hum. An accompanying risotto, which should have been savory to augment the bacon and scallops, was disconcertingly sweet from an apple cider reduction sauce. It was so sweet, in fact, that it neutralized any sweetness in the scallops by comparison.

Pan Roasted Half Chicken ($19 ** ½) entrée had some pizazz. It was a nicely cooked small bird, the breast still juicy while the leg and thigh were done through. Butternut squash and pecan halves added late-season flair to the plate and a sage brown butter had that herb’s distinctive woodsy aroma.

Two Cornmeal Crusted Rainbow Trout ($22 **) filets were thin, dry, inconsequential and overwhelmed by a bacon-mushroom hash and an intense, sweet, molasses butter sauce.