Wild Cherry Is Ready for Its Closeup

This could have easily been chaos, but it reads as mere idiosyncrasy, thanks to the sheer force of Wild Cherry’s appeal as a place to while away a few stylish hours. The music is hopping (when was the last time you heard “Ca’-Ba’-Dab,” by the Soul Swingers, and why isn’t every restaurant playing it on a loop?), and the mood is as warm as the lighting, with affable servers and bar staff whose enthusiasm is infectious. The cocktails skew tiki—a quart-size scorpion bowl with your dinner?—but they’re great, well-balanced and cleverly composed, like a zero-proof piña colada that gets heft and depth from hojicha, or a sherry highball tarted up with amaro and a splash of cola.

The sense of both seriousness and play extends to the food. Among a selection of chilled seafood is a showpiece-y whole Dungeness crab served “à la russe,” with stripes of finely minced chives, capers, and sieved egg; and a gorgeous scungilli salad, the tender slices of conch laced with celery leaves in a punchy vinaigrette, and served piled into the creature’s giant, whorling shell. The approach, over all, is eclectic but committed: a brawny kielbasa, redolent of garlic and studded with melty Comté, sits atop a languid bed of sauerkraut; hunks of chermoula-painted monkfish are laced on skewers and served with a tapenade of olives and raisins. Frogs’ legs—which Hanson and Nasr catapulted back into fashion with a persillade version at Le Veau d’Or—are battered and fried like little chicken drumettes, then glossed in butter and spangled with herbs. The menu’s only pasta is fettuccine Alfredo, a dish so earnestly out of style that it becomes viciously cool again; the sauce, made the traditional way, from just butter, Parmigiano, and an emulsifying splash of pasta water, is tossed together tableside by a server, sending fine particles of cheese flying everywhere like a joyous puff of confetti. For a hundred and twenty dollars, you can get a steak dinner for two, which includes a substantial Denver-cut filet, a lovely green salad, and an audaciously retrograde baked potato, which is also available à la carte, and which I plan to order regularly, alone at the bar, with a dirty Martini, and maybe a slab of pineapple-and-coconut cake for dessert.