Dateline: Bandywood, Green Hills, circa 1985. Like clowns from a Volkswagen, an impossibly large pack of teenage girls emerges from an American-made SUV. The rear window of the car is plastered with stickers from 96 Kiss, Waffle House and FM 103 WKDF. The girls are dressed in ankle-zipper jeans. After taking turns at the car's side mirrors to check their hair—which is universally streaked with Sun-In and frozen in motion by a revolutionary product known as "mousse"—the gangly gang traverses the crowded parking lot and enters the back door of Gameland.
Inside the dimly lit and pinball-addled two-story building, Cyndi Lauper bellows out the final chorus of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," her brash voice competing with the beeps, blips and doooioooioooings of doomed video game characters. The lip-gloss-licked amoeba of hormonally charged girls oozes across the room, from the Donkey Kong corner to the Asteroids table, perusing the high scores—with vague hope of recognizing a three-letter monogram—and occasionally stopping to roll the white ball of an idle Centipede game.
But no matter how many quarters work their way from the girls' LeSportsac purses into the glowing coin slots, nothing can disguise the fact that these gawky Gamelanders don't give a crap about Mario and Ms. Pac-Man so much as they want one of those pimply boys with floppy bangs and a denim jacket, standing by the Galaga machine, to notice them. Because oh my gawd, that would be so awesome.
Fortunately, a lot has changed since then, including clothes, music, hair and Gameland itself, which ultimately morphed into The Box Seat sports bar and reopened this fall as Crows Nest.
The latest project of the Corner Pub Group—which operates The Corner Pub in the Woods, The Alley and Dalton's in Bellevue, Austin's in Fieldstone Farms, Joe's Place on Bandywood and The Corner Pub in Midtown—brings together a handful of guys who remember the heyday of Gameland from their own denim-clad youth. Corner Pub Group owners AU Telwar, Doug Crow and Joe Gower have teamed up with restaurant veterans Keith Blakely and Ted Shelton—high school buddies of Telwar and Crow—to reinvent the popular Green Hills address with a multimillon-dollar renovation. Then they brought in general manager Nelson Green from Las Vegas and recruited chef Kelly Wetherford, an alumnus of The Trace, South Street and Bound'ry, to oversee the food.
Gone are the pool tables, replaced with seating for more than 250. While there are no longer video games, there are plenty of electronics in the high-tech bathrooms, where everything is automatic and video panels in the stalls display news and advertisements, like the backseat of a Manhattan taxi.
For anyone who ever skulked in the dark corners of Gameland or circled the smoky pool room of The Box Seat, Crows Nest is both a comfortable trip down memory lane and a welcome acknowledgment that life has moved on. The building is clean and smoke-free, the food is modern, and the restaurant is kid-friendly—after all, even pinball wizards grow up and breed. But the songs of Journey and Billy Joel climb the open central staircase and circle the sleek new HDTVs in the upstairs bar like a musical jab of I-know-what-you-did-last-century.
Chef Wetherford's double-sided menu runs the gamut of fried pickles ($6.95) and smoked wings ($8.95) to a crab cake sandwich ($10.95), gnocchi with shrimp and sausage ($15.95), seared tuna salad ($12.95) and ribs ($19.95), and tops out with a 14-ounce rib eye for $20.95.
It's a formula that defies easy classification: It's not exactly bar food, but there's a robust bar scene. It's not ladies-who-lunch fare, but the ladies who lunch in Green Hills should discover the seared tuna salad with miso vinaigrette and Asian slaw, topped with wasabi peas and cashews. It's not exactly a family restaurant, but it would be hard to name a place that treats kids better than Crows Nest, with its $5.95 kids menu. Whatever you want to call it, Crows Nest is the type of catch-all restaurant that has been missing for so long in Green Hills, and it has already insinuated itself into our all-purpose working-lunch-family-supper-and-dinner-before-a-movie repertoire.
Among the standout items are the house-smoked meats, including the pulled pork plate (with hot-water corn cakes) and the barbecue ribs, which come 14 baby backs to a slab. Crusted with lightly caramelized bits of bark, the moist pork clung to the bone just enough to require gentle gnawing, but wasn't so soggy with sauce that it was a messy meal.
Our young and very charming server, who had little or no awareness of the storied past of Gameland and The Box Seat, steered us toward the baked stuffed oysters, which made for a generous shared appetizer. A half-dozen shells served as a canvas for a rich breadcrumb stuffing of bacon, mushrooms, spinach and Parmesan, which oozed over plump succulent oysters and was lightly crusty on top. The accompanying ramekin of drawn butter was redundant, but the side of roasted red pepper remoulade offered a cool counterpoint to the hot and buttery dish.
As much as any item, the fried green tomato appetizer showcased the Crows Nest's updated spin on traditional cooking. The stack of three panko-coated golden-brown disks layered with goat cheese and garnished with a bountiful spear of rosemary seamlessly modernized the traditional Southern fare.
Gnocchi with shrimp and sausage recalled the peppery New Orleans-style pan sauce with beer and brown-butter, but while the recipe was fresh and flavorful, it was far too salty for some of our palates. We mined the tender, flavorful meat and pasta from the bowl, but forfeited the chance to sop up the spicy drippings with the slices of buttered toast. For bayou-flavored fare, we preferred the po'boy of deep-fried oysters and crisp slaw on a loaf of Charpier's locally baked bread.
The Turkey Reuben on soft grilled marble rye with slaw, Swiss cheese and thinly sliced house-smoked turkey was a plentiful and fresh meal, served with a ramekin of chunky cranberry relish and crinkle fries. On the pricier side of the sandwich roster, steak and biscuits recalled the classic meal from the bygone Ireland's restaurant. Four sliders of melt-in-your-mouth tenderloin on fluffy biscuits could make a sufficient meal for two.
Many items come with choice of sides, and Crows Nest offers a range of vegetables and starches with plenty of opportunity to create a healthy meal (with asparagus or grilled veggies, for example) or a heavy one (with smoked cheddar hash browns or mac-and-cheese with bacon).
In the first days of operation, Crows Nest has made a terrific first impression, and if the team maintains its attention to detail, we'll expect this incarnation of the Bandywood landmark to become a new Green Hills tradition. If there were one thing we'd wish for, it would be a more interesting dessert menu. On our visits, it was limited to cakes and pies, including one particularly unremarkable chocolate meringue.
The other shortcoming is the tight swath of parking in front of the building, which has long been a drawback—from the days when parents dropped their kids off at the game room with rolls of coins. Nowadays, unless you're the first one there, you'll probably have to submit to the sophistication of valet parking. Oh, well. Everyone has to grow up eventually.
