There aren’t many restaurants where you can be as sure of getting a last-minute table at 7:45 p.m. as you can at the Downstairs Bistro at 2nd Story Theatre in Warren.
A table? Heck, you can have the whole place to yourself. Just don’t try sitting down at 6 p.m. without a reservation. The place will be packed.
The reason for the discrepancy is the reason for the restaurant itself: The Downstairs Bistro is an adjunct to the theater, and show time is 8 p.m. That means if you want to be finished eating in time to see the show, you’ll need a reservation for 6.
The same dining room that is full of noise and activity from 6 p.m. empties all at once to become as quiet as a tomb at exactly 7:45. (Dinner service continues to 9, and a partial tavern menu is available to 11:30 p.m.)
After opening 2nd Story in Warren five years ago, Ed Shea had the idea to buy the downstairs restaurant, then A.J. Dylan’s, and make it a place where theatergoers could congregate and eat either before or after a show without worrying about parking or the timing of dining.
He hired actor and chef John Michael Richardson to manage the place, and Richardson has been there ever since in an arrangement Richardson describes as a perfect partnership.
“It’s very unique. We’re a theater restaurant, but not at all a dinner theater. That would be the kiss of death.
“The play’s the main event, and we’re here to put people in the best possible mood before they go upstairs” to see the show
The idea has proved such a success that throughout the runs of the last three shows on the theater schedule, the restaurant has been sold out with advance reservations every night. (The Bistro is only open on show nights: Thursdays through Sundays as long as the play runs. The current show, A Flea in Her Ear, runs though March 11.)
On a typical show night, says Richardson, as many as two-thirds of the theater audience also dines in the restaurant.
Richardson, who acts in many of the plays, including the present one – as do many of the Bistro’s waiters and waitresses – serves as executive chef supervising the kitchen. But each year he brings in undergraduate students from Johnson & Wales University to design a new menu and do the actual cooking, so he doesn’t have to worry about getting into costume and racing up the stairs to act after cooking all evening.
This year, the student head chef is Ken Korczyk.
Certain items remain on the menu through different chefs-in-training, says Richardson. “The burger, the pad Thai, the chocolate bread pudding are all things that our customers have come to expect, so we will always have them, or some variation of them.”
(Richardson, who is from Louisiana, makes the desserts himself in the afternoons, drawing from his Southern mother’s repertoire of recipes and using huge blackberries from his own West Warwick garden.)
Changing scene
Last week, I dined with a party of six beginning at 7, meaning that we had the surreal experience of beginning our meal in a cacophony of sound, and finishing it in total silence, the wood paneled dining room and its wait staff entirely our own, with only the occasional thumping of feet on floorboards overhead reminding us that a play was in performance upstairs.
The Bistro includes two rooms, the outer one an adjunct to the theater offices and far more casual than the inner one, where the paneling and the burnished copper tabletops impart the ambiance of a comfortable Victorian parlor. If you didn’t already associate the Bistro with the theater, you would guess it from the stage presence of the wait staff, all of whom have the carriage and articulate vocal delivery of theater professionals.
The menu is limited in scope, with only four appetizers, four salads and eight entrees offered, along with three or four desserts, five red and eight white wines.
Presentation ranges from homey to as fancy as you’d expect to find in a far tonier place. Grilled lamb chops, for instance, which I had as my entrée, were perfectly cooked, a generous rack set as a bouquet atop a delicious mound of roasted cubes of root vegetables including turnip, parsnip, sweet potato and celery root. The dish was delicious and very fairly priced at $20. But the Bistro filet that others in my party tried was disappointing. It was our mistake to have supposed that “filet” meant mignon, which it did not here, but for $18 we would have expected a higher quality of beef.
Similarly, a Chef’s Burger seemed overpriced at $12 for what was a home-style sautéed hamburger on a bun with only a few undressed greens accompanying it on the plate.
But the pad Thai ($14 with shrimp and bay scallops) was excellent and stunningly presented on a bamboo leaf in a big straw basket. And an appetizer of smoked bacon crab cakes ($10) was enough to make a meal of, with two good-sized cakes loaded with crabmeat and nicely garnished with a sweet corn sauce and mizuna salad.
Delicious desserts
Wines are well-chosen in the price range of $20 to $25 for a bottle, $5 to $6 for glasses. We enjoyed a Four Sisters Australian Shiraz and a St. Francis Chardonnay from California.
Desserts are both abundant and delicious. We loved especially a Berry Crumble and the moist and dense Chocolate Bread Pudding (each $7), each served with a copious mound of whipped cream and a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream.
An ambrosia ($5) combining chopped apples, pears and peaches with a dusting of fresh coconut in a splash of Schnapps is a Southern classic from his youth, Richardson explained later. “We Southerners like a little kick to finish, you know?”
The “kick” is part of what he conceives as the goal of the Bistro: “It comes down to three things: Taste, presentation, and price.
“It’s just like the theater in that, above all, that wow factor has got to be there.”
