Marketing can bring in the first-time customer, but building up a faithful clientele requires execution. Hell’s Kitchen may appeal to the sophisticated urban diner because of its name but serve him bad food and he won’t take "Well, it is from Hell’s Kitchen, after all, ha ha!" as an excuse. (Somehow, irony applies to our intellect but is generally lost on our tastebuds.) Well, sorry to say—sorry because I had got my expectations raised about the place—but on the basis of our limited experience this restaurant lives up to its name!

The menu is manageable. Three salads (Caesar, house, Greek), a half-dozen each of sandwiches and entrees, plus breakfast items are available for lunch. Your waitress, in our case looking a little Hellish herself with dyed hair, black outfit, and body piercing that made me cringe, will also recount daily specials. On this day the recounted items included buttermilk biscuits with sausage gravy and a chicken-and-mushroom hash.

Notable items on the menu include a vegetarian panini, which has eggplant and fennel among other ingredients; a weird goulash with macaroni and Italian sausage (it’s "Mom’s specialty"); crab cakes also from a "special recipe"; a half-pound bison burger; a ham-and-pear crisp sandwich (thinly sliced smoked ham with poached pear); and a walleye BLT which the St. Paul Pioneer Press rated one of the year’s top ten dishes in the Twin Cities.

The novelty of the WBLT, and the SPPP recommendation, sold me. One gets a choice of sourdough and multigrain for the bread; our waitress recommended the latter and I went with that. The sandwiches also come with a choice of coleslaw, fresh fruit, or French fries (entrée accompaniments are a "bucket of bread" and butter). The B and L were much better than the W and T. The bacon in particular, from Neuske, was excellent, meaty and lean. The walleye was a cornmeal dusted filet and was a bit overcooked: enough to notice if you were in critic mode. I was especially disappointed in the tomato slices; when good, flavorful, vine-ripened tomatoes can be had in every backyard in town one would think Hell’s would be able to procure some. The sandwich spread is a lemon-scallion tartar sauce that was too lemony. My dish gets points for concept, though, and I might even order it again, hopeful of better execution.

B ordered the chicken-and-mushroom hash, which came with a poached egg on top. In this case the concept was awry too, not just execution. The dish seemed to me to consist of a number of ingredients sautéed together; I’m mystified what made it a hash unless the restaurant is using the term in a general, not culinary, sense.

As if the Hades theme wasn’t enough to design a décor and marketing strategy around, Hell’s also is a mini-museum for Ralph Steadman, a Colorado artist who the menu informs us is "world-renowned"—I’m too much of a philistine to have heard of him before, apparently. He has even designed labels for Flying Dog, a line of ales that is available at Hell’s—I sampled one, the "Tire Biter": a light brew with a distinctive citrus note, not really what I look for in a beer.

We could have managed dessert but the only options were Sebastian Joe’s ice cream and a chocolate cake, and we passed. My espresso was chocolaty with about the right degree of acidity, but was served lukewarm.

Hell’s Kitchen wasn’t hell, but the Steadman self-portrait above our table captured my post-prandial state well … it was titled "Disappointed Old Fart."

I share my home with a black cat—feline, in case you’re wondering if B has slipped into the street vernacular of the seventies—named Horace. He’d be the perfect mascot for Hell’s Kitchen if he wasn’t already spoken for by the Jacksonville Jaguars. His sleek black fur and green eyes would perfectly accent the black flags and shrouds that decorate the entrance to Hades. The concept behind Hell’s Kitchen almost makes it complaint proof. If you like what’s on offer then it was hellishly ingenious, if you don’t, well after all this is hell, what do you expect? Alas! This cavalier approach doesn’t work with the jaded appetites of The Lunch. I found a menu that is poorly designed; a wait staff that is clueless; and a kitchen that makes a "hash" of even the most basic of fare.

The location is cute with its red-bricked entrance. Inside you will find a deceptively large, almost serpentine space that connects the front dining area of the restaurant with the rear. The colors are red and black (as you might expect in Beelzebub’s den), with a red topped balustrade that runs the length of the connecting passage. There is interesting art (sketches and posters) on the walls. I sat under a Ralph Steadman (who is he?) South African sketch entitled "Disappointed old fart," this could well sum up my dining experience but more about that later. I suspect breakfast is the big meal here, lunch is reluctantly catered but don’t bother to show up for dinner because it isn’t served. The breakfast seems to be targeted at all-night ravers, and others of the party-circuit ilk who need a bloody Mary to see in the next day.

I asked the waitress about wines by the glass. The list of reds is not large: house Merlot and a cabernet is about it. The beer list has some interesting names on it: Lucifer’s Belgian golden ale, Maudite (The Damned) ale and The End of the World beer. I chose a Flying Dog beer (apparently from Colorado) with an interesting label but the beer was rather thin. The specials of the day included biscuits with sausage gravy and a chicken hash with a poached egg and hollandaise sauce. The regular menu is pretty straightforward with a few salads (house, Greek and Caesar), sandwiches (Bison burger, BLT, W(allye)BLT, Pork BBQ and a chicken breast sandwich), entrées (chicken divan, walleye fillet and chili crushed pork medallions). There isn’t much in the ways of appetizers so we ordered our meals directly. I chose the chicken hash, which is served in an open-face sandwich style, and the kitchen made a right hash of this dish. The poached egg was overcooked to the point of dryness and the promised hollandaise sauce was missing, whether it could have redeemed the bone dry, tough chicken is debatable. A seemed to be faring a bit better with his order of the WLBT but not by much I’d wager. The dessert was limited to Sebastian Joe’s ice cream and chocolate cake so we gave it a miss. A managed to get an espresso, which brought our bill to $39.00.

A cute concept is in jeopardy because of poor execution (namely the kitchen). There is so much possibility of play with the concept of hell and death. For instance the music on the sound system could be exclusively that of dead artists most likely to have gone to hell: Jim Morrison and/or Janis Joplin. The requiem mass and the symphony for the dead might also be suitable material. The walls could have framed poems: Anthem for a doomed youth; Aubade. The possibilities are unending. As it is Engelbert Humperdinck regaled us with:

Hellish enough you’d agree.

B