Cox: Jack and Tony’s Restaurant and Whisky Bar

Bacon wrapped scallops from Jack and Tony’s Restaurant and Whisky Bar in Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square. (John Burgess/The Press Democrat)

To cut right to the chase, Jack and Tony’s Restaurant and Whisky Bar in Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square District is a whimsically named place where Jack Mitchell is the chef and “Tony” is Jack’s doppelganger in a pin-striped suit who runs the whiskey bar.

Tony’s is a better whiskey bar than Jack’s is a restaurant, so let’s examine the bar scene first. If you are in a mood to mingle, scads of people are usually decompressing after a stressful workday with a shot of something tasty and even exotic; the whiskey menu offers over 300 choices. It’s whiskey if you are drinking American or Irish products, but whisky, spelled without the “e,” if you’re drinking Scotch, Canadian or Japanese spirits.

GALLERY:  Jack and Tony’s Restaurant and Whisky Bar

The bartender is helpful and will guide you in the delicate art of adding water to your whiskey. A smattering of water opens up the spirit, reducing its alcoholic brutality and smoothing it as it enhances its nose and flavor. With bourbon, the water is properly called “branch,” the Kentucky patois for creek.

How much water to add? That’s something each imbiber must decide for him or herself. If you are new to whiskey, ask the bartender to recommend an amount, then increase or decrease it in future drinks until it suits your taste. Be aware, however, that “cask strength” Scotch is almost always undiluted and absolutely requires water to make it palatable.

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.

Butterscotch pudding make with real Scotch and butter

But there was one item on the menu that astonished everyone at our table, and it came at the end of the dinner. It was the dessert called Ballantine’s Butterscotch Pudding Parfait ($6 ****), and for the first time in our lives, everyone in our party understood why it’s called butterscotch. It’s made with Ballantine’s blended Scotch whisky and butter, both ingredients blending into a satisfying synergistic flavor. That orange pudding we ate as kids was just some food chemist’s attempt to re-create the real thing. This, however, is the real deal and if you order it, you will never think about butterscotch pudding in the same way again.

To sum up: An excellent whiskey bar and passable restaurant make Jack and Tony’s worth a visit.

Jeff Cox writes a weekly restaurant review column for the Sonoma Living section. You can reach him at jeffcox@sonic.net.

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JACK AND TONY’S RESTAURANT AND WHISKY BAR
Where: 115 Fourth St. in Railroad Square, Santa Rosa
When: Lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and dinner from 5 to 10 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. Closed Sundays
Reservations: Call 526-4347
Price range: Expensive to very expensive, with entrees from $19 to $29
Website: jackandtonys.com

Whisky list: ****
Ambiance: **½
Service: ***
Food: **½
Overall: ***

**** Extraordinary
*** Very good
** Good
* Not very good
0 Terrible