Everybody likes the BalMar, Ballard's new hotspot—everybody but me. Why am I such a malcontent?
Last Friday night around 8:00 p.m. nearly every seat in the BalMar's capacious downstairs was taken. Standing there and blinking stupidly brought instantaneous, extremely cheerful assistance with finding a spot. Thirtysomething heterosexual couples on dates occupied the bar, while, as if by some preexisting arrangement, the low tables hosted a flotilla of groups of girlfriends exclusively. Everyone held martini glasses filled with colorful liquid. A sort of easy-listening house soundtrack pulsed, adding urgency to the satisfied din.
The BalMar's got every element of a certain upscale bar formula: exposed brick, sleek lines, hardwood floors, banquettes with tasteful pillows. Modern light fixtures that resemble giant glowing strips of film share the loftlike airspace with vintage opaque glass ones. If you could order people from Restoration Hardware, this clientele would arrive via FedEx; good-looking but not ostentatiously so, well-groomed but not overdressed, having fun but not being frantic about it. Upstairs, the demographic skews slightly to the twentysomething side—apparently drawn by the pool tables, youth rises.
The BalMar is only a month old, independent, and locally owned, yet inside it might be 1999 or next year, New York or L.A. or San Francisco or, probably at this point, Cleveland. Also, it is very loud, as these places of hard surfaces and perpendicular angles are wont to be. Only near-screaming made conversation ("What? WHAT?") possible last Friday night. No one else, let me hasten to point out, seemed troubled by the place's individuality or lack thereof, nor did I see anyone else taking Advil.
The server was great—professional and efficient and nice. The specialty drinks were not so great. A Ryan Lee—pear brandy, ginger, lemon—tasted like medicine. Usually I like medicine; this, not so much. A Capri cocktail—grapefruit vodka, grapefruit juice, and Campari—was found undrinkably bitter rather than sour, more like rind than fruit. The server, noticing its abandonment, graciously removed it from the bill ("No Like," the printout read, the funniest thing all night).
No one else seemed to have a problem with the food from the fancy, ambitious small-plates menu, either. But garlic greens with sultana raisins seemed to have been soaked in seawater, and, alas, my first experimental bite yielded some unidentifiable hard little object that hurt my tooth. Two out of three Kobe beef meatballs had stringy parts, while the third, oddly, was oversalted. Seared scallops were cooked too long, and their cream sauce was runny and dull, and kabocha squash made for a strange part of the dish, particularly since its edges had been caramelized to crystalline sugar.
But what comes out of the kitchen at a place like BalMar isn't going to make or break it. The formula will work regardless—at least for everybody but me.
The BalMar is located at 5449 Ballard Avenue NW, 297-0500.
