Entree NWA: 1936 Club

Full disclosure: I went into the 1936 Club for the purpose of this review with an established bias. I’ve been here a few times before, almost always for drinks. I have really enjoyed those drinks.

The bar at the 1936 club is sophisticated without being ostentatious. Its depth will surprise you; the bartenders are smart (and smartly dressed), and I say without reservation they make the best sour mix — and therefore the best whiskey sours — in town. I have really enjoyed those whiskey sours.

Friends have told me that the 1936 Club also offers a great number of other fine cocktails and a good wine list. What the bar offers in a glass is enhanced by what the 1936 Club offers in class. The 1936 Club should earn royalties on the idea of shabby chic. Olsen Twins, listen up. This is a look that wasn’t planned, this is a look that happened. The inside manages touches that are gothic and baroque and even grotesque in a genteel sort of way.

The floors are a black-and-white tile chessboard. A screen of a nude hangs in the front window, near a statue of a potbellied Buddha. Burgundy and green dominate – the green of antique lamps and oxidized copper. You get the feeling a burlesque show could explode at any minute. On the walls are prints by Fayetteville’s internationally renowned master of the absurd, Donald Roller Wilson. I don’t know much about Fayetteville’s old money, but I imagine that this is their sort of place: dark and strange, adorned in tributes to the senses, defiant in its whimsy. And just pricy enough to keep out the riff-raff. It’s not for everyone. And for that reason, the 1936 Club is one of the few places in Northwest Arkansas that really feels like it has earned the name “club.”

And so I went for lunch on a recent Thursday to see what, beyond cocktails, the club (as I’ve begun to call it) has to offer. My companion and I arrived early, 11:30, and found the place entirely ours. The hostess invited us to sit wherever we liked, and I liked where we sat. Even next to the window, it was delightfully shadowy.

The 1936 Club has earned a reputation for a menu full of surprises, particularly Old-World fare that challenges mainstream American sensibilities. This day was no exception. Immediately we set eyes on the Chicken Farmer salad. The salad part is greens with blue cheese, bacon and apple. The chicken farmer part is fried chicken livers. That’s right.  Haven’t had chicken liver, you say? Not even dipped in flour and mindfully fried? Neither had I, until this fateful day.

Even beyond the chicken liver salad, the menu had personality to spare. There’s a section dubbed “Spoon food,” which is a way of avoiding saying “soup” – definitely the province of ordinary restaurants. There’s not even a soup of the day. At the club, there’s “Yesterday’s soup,” which is followed by this parenthetical: (Even better today.) I’m a literal guy so I checked this out with the waitress. “Is this really soup made yesterday or is this a way of being cute?” I asked. She stammered a bit and then said, “It’s cute.” Readers, now you know. Yesterday’s soup is a way of saying today’s soup – when you’re in the club. Yesterday’s (today’s) Soup is also joined by a Gumbo of the Day. They don’t make a joke about freshness when seafood is involved. Good move.

Other items of interest include the Thai Steak Salad and the Greek Steak Salad Pita. Intriguing sandwiches are the Jambalaya (yes, a jambalaya sandwich), the black pepper crusted steak, pesto chicken and roasted red pepper, and a blackened fish sandwich on a brioche with cilantro-lime mayo. There’s also a steak broiled over lava rocks and a few pasta dishes, including spaghetti carbonara with bacon and garlic in an egg-parmesan sauce.

That’s not an enormous menu, but its variety is impressive. My dinner companion, who has lived around the world and sampled cuisine far beyond the experiences of my provincial palate, seemed satisfied. He asked a smart question of the chef, who was hanging around the bar. It’s a club. Why not? I was pleased to see that he looked the part: large with silver hair and decked in the white garb of his vocation. My companion dared to ask about a subject I would never have broached: the chicken livers. “What’s the breading like?” he asked. My pen was poised. “Flour dusted,” he said flatly. “And they’re fried in bacon fat.” This guy was serious. “The salad already has blue cheese dressing and bacon,” said the chef. “So why not go all the way?”

I saw his logic. So did my companion. He ordered the chicken liver salad. He also ordered Yesterday’s (today’s) Soup: Gazpacho. I ordered the Gumbo of the Day as a starter. The appetizers came with reasonable swiftness. My companion, who for years lived in Spain, where Gazpacho is something of a national dish, deemed the cup before him “good.” The vegetables were finely diced, lightly spicy – “more than just tomato,” he said. He praised its “nice, fresh vegetable taste” and picked out the flavors of celery and onion. He noted the nicely toasted croutons on top.

My gumbo also had mild heat. It was dark brown and thick with okra and oyster and something else that seemed to me pork. I asked the big chef what was in it. He said oysters and bass. That caused my learned companion to cock an eyebrow. “Strange combination,” he said. I decided not to care. Whatever it was, I liked it.

The chicken liver salad came out. I almost choked on my pork/bass gumbo. It was an enormous pile of greens, spilling over with slices of green apples and great chunks of blue cheese. And everywhere, chicken livers. They were larger than I expected. Bigger than big prunes. Shimmering and menacing. I tried not to recoil. Indeed I was brave. I admitted to my companion I had not ever had liver. He looked at me with the pity only an educated man can muster. Try one, he said.

I felt I had to. Not even for this review, but to earn back a semblance of his respect. I took a bite from his salad. Bacon. It was almost entirely bacon. “It’s good!” I said. I went for another. This one was liver. The real deal. “It’s good!” I said again, out loud. But in my mouth, I tasted something gamey and unseemly. I grew up in Iowa. My family raised chickens. One of my earliest memories is of a chicken slaughter with my grandpa and uncles. One decapitated chicken crashed into my 4-year-old self, its neck spewing an umbrella of blood. I cried and clutched my mother. Don’t get me wrong. I do not have a trauma-induced aversion to chicken; I eat buckets of it. But this taste reminded me of the smell of that day. I did not take a third bite.

My entrée arrived: the pepper steak sandwich. It arrived on butter-soaked crunchy “country” bread, slathered with horseradish. The pepper and the horseradish worked together to deliver a good season with just the right kick in the back of the mouth. On the side were homemade French fries, with the skin, and without the batter. And good peppery slaw. The sandwich and the fixins were all delicious.

My companion ordered another salad, for good measure: the Greek Steak Salad Pita. When it arrived, he oscillated between the two. I also grabbed a bit of this one. The salad, with Kalamata olives, steak, red onions, and greens, is layered atop a pita slathered with Tzatziki sauce. Delicious. My companion enjoyed both, but favored the Chicken Farmer salad. Indeed he had picked it clean of all the livers. He liked that the Chicken Farmer salad had blue cheese and vinaigrette but not a blue cheese vinaigrette. He also admired the tenderness of the steak on the Greek salad. “It comes with a steak knife,” he said, “but you could cut this steak with a butter knife, easily.”

As we were eating, I noticed the restaurant slowly filling up. It was the crowd I expected. Entirely silver haired. Well-heeled. They came in groups and seemed to know each other. And they knew the chef, who was joshing with a group from behind the bar while chugging a Corona. This was a club, alright. I was excited to be a part of it. The chef wandered over to check on us. We praised the meal. My dinner partner expressed his satisfaction with the liver. The chef looked pleased. “It’s all downhill from here,” he said. “No one cooks liver like me.”

The menu had no dessert. But I wanted to linger a bit longer. I looked at my watch. It was past noon; surely it was OK. My eyes wandered over to the bar, where my attraction to the 1936 Club first began. I ordered a whiskey sour. It was good to be back in the club.