My positive take on our metro area (or at any rate its downtown hubs) could be chalked up to parochialism, but it is continually reinforced by comments from friends and colleagues. I have been struck by the number of people who have noted one local establishment in this context, the dear departed Loring Café and Bar in Loring Park.

The food at Loring Bar often seemed like an afterthought; you came for the décor and the party atmosphere and the people watching. Bar Lurcat hasn’t sacrificed on the atmospherics and décor (the people watching can be undertaken evenings but at the moment the offerings are meager for lunch) but in addition you can now consider coming for the food.

You can’t however, be too picky about what you eat. The 13-page menu, presented as an artsy clipboard, is one page of food and 12 of drinks. The food items are divided into a 16 small plates and singleton lists of cheese and dessert. Unlike the restaurant side of the place the food items are not completely a la carte, so one entrée can help you check off multiple layers of the food pyramid.

But let’s start with the appetizerlike small plates. Choices here include oysters, salmon tartar, soup, and a couple of salads. The provenance of the oysters varies; on this day there were two varieties available, Hood Canal and Hama Hama. We ordered these (or, rather, B ordered a couple of each as he waited for me to show up late). I’m not a big oyster fan so B’s review is probably more authoritative on this front; I preferred the Hood Canal somewhat—the Hama Hama had a toothy, meatier center—but overall I’d rate them average. They were served with horseradish and a mignonette, which B, a purist when it comes to oysters, eschewed.

Other plates include creative sandwich offerings. I had one of these, the grilled pressed duck sandwich (another one notable for its novelty although I suspect not a best seller is a bacon, egg, and harissa sandwich). Unfortunately, this has turned out to be my least favorite dish in Lurcat. I thought it would be the duck that was pressed but in fact it was the whole enchilada. The effect was a homogenization in which the grilled bread and the mustard overwhelmed the taste of the duck. The sandwich was presented in a small French metal bucket (there’s probably some euphonious special name for this food container), with crackly homemade potato chips and pickled cauliflower ("it’s good for you," our waitress told me).

On the positive side, the buttermilk fried chicken and the Lurcat burgers are excellent. The fried chicken may be the best I’ve ever had (although I order fried chicken even less frequently than oysters) plus it comes with a tasty skin-on potato and tangy mustard salad (the same mustard as used less felicitously in the duck sandwich). The Lurcat burgers come as a succulent, unadorned pair (no accompaniments in this case). Also meriting mention is the sea bass marinated in miso with a sweet and sour cucumber salad.

A word of warning: The portion sizes are highly variable depending on what you get and when. I’ve seen the sea bass come in generous as well as almost miserly portions. The fried chicken was an ample meal on my one exposure to it.

If you want to prolong lunch, and well you might, Lurcat offers one cheese plate and one dessert. The former is presented as slices of five different artisan cheeses along with a generous supply of toasted bread rounds. The dessert, which we tried, is small cinnamon sugar donuts, six to an order. They’re served fresh and warm. On this sampling they were light and airy on the outside but with a denseness to their core that could induce heartburn.

Lurcat fare is not intended to be blindly consumed; the preparations are elegant, eye-catching arrangements on clean white rectangular plates. The attention to visual detail is also apparent in the room, although the elegance of the furnishings and décor is decidedly more eclectic. Chairs and tables are a mix and match of designs and materials (leather, fabric, marble, steel, wood), and layouts range from living-room evocations to bar stools and high tables. The eclecticism extends to the lighting as well, with modern floor lamps and ornate chandeliers illuminating each other, and to the floor, which is set with multiple styles of tile. It all works well and surprisingly harmoniously, in large part because of the scale of the space. The room is huge in terms of square as well as cubic footage—the main space is a two-story atrium with an upstairs seating area, visible from the main floor, behind one wall.

Nature pleasantly intrudes on the artifice through the presence of several large palms indoors and the floor-to-ceiling windows with flower boxes, in full bloom at this time of year. An outside patio is an equally attractive proposition on fine days, presenting views of Loring Park and the Sculpture Garden bridge from a shaded sanctuary under umbrellas and old trees.

The old Loring helped destroy the myth of the Midwest, and now Bar Lurcat carries on the mission.

The old Loring bar had some admirable qualities. The music played there, whether live or recorded, always reflected the cultural diversity of the crowd. If it wasn’t a sound track in Bedouin Arabic then it was probably the legendary Louis Armstrong serenading the Bohemian crowd. But it was too good to last and finally after a struggle of Homeric proportions Jason struck camp and ceded the lease back to the landlord. Having said that there is a notable improvement in the space that was formerly occupied by The Loring and now home to Lurcat, the venue for The Lunch this week. For starters Jason presided over a haphazard labyrinth of a bar and restaurant; It was cluttered, not always clean, and the kitchen was more of a miss than a hit. The service was indifferent and bizarrely prided itself in this – many suburbanites didn’t consider their Loring experience complete until a waitperson had been sufficiently rude. In sharp contrast Lurcat is clean, serene and well run. The only strike against it is the knowledge that it belongs to the D’Amico & Sons stable of restaurants, which also includes last week’s Campiello. The Loring was a unique creation with its warts and all and is greatly missed.

Lurcat only serves lunch Friday through Sunday – in a way this is a violation of The Lunch’s charter, but I suppose Fridays are pretty good days to sneak out of the office for that extra long lunch. And Lurcat is just the place to unwind and forget your stressful morning with its uncluttered décor and clean lines. Take the mosaic floor with its black/white/pink square underneath a ceiling that looks like a series of massive oil paintings, framed and primed with a French blue, ready for the master’s touch. The light fixtures include antique-art-deco chandeliers and impressively enough of a type were found to hang throughout the restaurant.

There are two sides to Lurcat: the formal restaurant side, which is firmly closed for lunch on all days, and the "lounge" side, which serves "small plates" and where I found myself waiting for A. I chose a high table inside – I could, instead, have chosen to sit at the bar, regular table or outside on the patio. Our table (or at least my chair) was underneath a rather tall potted plant that looked suspiciously like a banana plant and its fern would brush against my head every time I’d nod my head. The patio seating, on this warm day, looked very inviting with Loring Park in its spring splendor and its tiny lake glinting in the sunshine.

The wine list is long as your arm and boasts forty wines by the glass and over two hundred bottles to choose from, indeed the innovatively designed menu—looks like a clipboard—has only the front page that lists food the remaining pages are given over to wine. From this daunting list I chose the first Pinot Noir, an HRM-Rex Goliath, an inspired choice as it turned out, with powerful berry perfume and touches of cinnamon. The menu lists what it calls "small plates"; these include: raw oysters, salmon & tuna tartare, shrimp salad, sea bass, seared ahi, fried calamari, seafood cutlet, pressed duck sandwich, burger, hanger steak (with blue cheese), bacon-egg-and-harissa sandwich, fried buttermilk chicken and cheese puffs.

For an appetizer we shared an order of four oysters (two hama hama and two hood canal). I thought both were good, although I preferred the hama hama whereas A liked the hood canal better. Primed with oysters I decided to stick to a seafood motif and ordered the seafood cutlet. Now on several occasion you will have heard us complain about how some restaurant portions are large beyond all proportions. This is not a problem at Lurcat; when they say "small plates" they mean it! My cutlet was small and perfect for a light lunch. It was served with fresh greens, pickled melon and a spicy, creamy sauce. The cutlet was delicious, given the right amount of spice (courtesy of the sauce) and tartness (pickled melon). A ordered the impressive sounding pressed duck sandwich but the execution was less successful in this case with the duck’s flavor all but masked by the pressed toasted bread. The menu is surprisingly lacking in dessert; our only choice was cinnamon doughnuts, which we ordered against our better judgement. They were deep fried and not palatable.

Considering who Jean Lurcat was and the obvious French Art Deco motif going on here—there is even a 1935 Peugeot Acceleration print on the wall—but the menu claims American cuisine. The music on the sound system was also French, quite dramatic music with lots of horns and brass. I wonder if a u-turn has been done on the French concept because of the ridiculous anti-French sentiments prevalent? We will never know.

The service was extremely friendly if not terribly swift. I think our waitress was serving inside as well as on the patio. With A’s espresso the bill came to $58.00. I was surprised by the paucity of diners but the various stages of human age were well represented, from five to eighty I’d reckon.

B