What, if anything, is the difference between concept & vision?
Does it matter, so long as it’s realized?
And if it isn’t realized—does the answer then matter?
To tailor the conundrum to fit oh-so-prog-retro Interstate Kitchen & Bar, modeled on the roadside diners of the postwar & Space Age eras: when a menu is primarily the reflection of a tongue-in-cheek image, with what sort of intergrity can it be executed?
These aren’t rhetorical questions; having sampled a fair portion of the modest-sized repertoire in two visits, I remain unsure as to the motives/expectations/hopes behind the venture. No doubt the owners have been quoted about their intentions somewhere (here, in fact), but I want to be able to discern the truth from a meal (or two, even). And I haven’t been able to yet—not least because my lunch & dinner experiences were night & day.
Which isn’t to say I haven’t had loads of fun trying to figure out where the downhome cookin’ with an apostrophe-n stops & the disingenuous urban myth thereof starts.
Consider the spoonbread.
The above was served at dinner, when the place was sparkling with party people. With that bruléed crust beneath a pool of butter, it looked completely different than the version I’d had at lunch the day before when the dining room was virtually empty—pale & sporting an unmelted dollop of butter on top. The mouthfeel & flavor were more developed as well, custardy & even a little spicy (a touch of cayenne?) rather than just kinda amorphously gummy & underseasoned.
Likewise, ponder the fried shrimp ravioli—or “raviolis,” as the menu puts it, exemplifying my uncertainty about the place. Is that just ignorance of the Italian plural or a deliberate nod to the byroads & backways of Americanization?
In any case, though both boasted a nice sopaipilla-like puff, the dinnertime version contained noticeably more shrimp filling & a much richer, butter-mounted marinara. Butter is no behind-the-scenes ingredient at Interstate but an in-your-face player, so much so that it also raises questions about the message any given meal is meant to convey. Does butter, in its prominence, serve as yet another prop on this set designed to whisk us to a Route 66 hashhouse? If so, should it? Are there restaurants in which the food can & should be made to be in service of the mood, the substance in service of the style, rather than the other way around? Does the fact that such questions came up for me at every turn return us to the issue of marketable concept versus organic vision?
Moving on. It wasn’t appropriate for me to snap shots at the lunch I attended, so you’ll have to take my word for it that
—the fried chicken livers, appealingly presented in a paper cone, were too heavily breaded. Is the goal to make them palatable to hipsters who want to say they eat offal? Is that a worthwhile goal? Why not just admit this might not be the time or place for trend-dangling, & fry up the usual suspects instead? As for garnish, the ketchup-thick housemade hot sauce was good, but the pickle was so skimpy as to be pointless: just two disks, see-through-thin.
—the tomato soup was flat-out odd, the namesake ingredient blunted rather than enhanced by either wine or wine vinegar; the grilled cheese was plain & boring. I’d be curious to know what type of cheese it was, & whether we were dealing with some attempt to keep it real by making it fake: that is, to hearken back to the days of better living through chemistry by using nonartisanal, processed cheddar or even American—not Velveeta, to be sure, but not much more flavroful than that. If not, perhaps they need to rethink it a bit, maybe use a cheese blend.
—the mild pastrami on rye was a go, given a neat twist with coleslaw qua filling. But it came with a side of awkwardness: potato chips whose salt-&-vinegar topping appeared in the form of an almost sweet pink powder, for no good reason we could discern. Labs exist to ensure failed experiments don’t escape from them.
—the nonstandard (and thus rightly quotation-marked) “Cobb” was the real deal inspiration-wise: tossed rather than composed, it was a jumble of clumps of crispy, fatty bacon; chunks of roasted chicken thigh; globs of excellent, pungent blue cheese (why here & not on the sandwich?); & IIRC Boston lettuce smeared in a fine hot bacon dressing.
Though the meal as a whole was obviously a mixed bag, I was intrigued enough by it to want to stick my hand back in & see what came up the next night. In addition to the aforementioned, the deviled eggs
were, except for the drop of sturgeon roe on top, carefully classic. Given the glut of sloppy token attempts out there, kudos to Interstate for treating the recipe with respect.
Of the entrees, our pal Keith’s burger was the simple favorite:
dripping patty with a slightly pink center, nice fresh bun. (It came with some rough, unbalanced horseradish & Dijon sauces—they needed either smoothing out or forgetting about in favor of plain horseradish & mustard.)
My buffalo meatloaf with grits was also mostly terrific—seemingly low on starchy filler & hence especially robust, as were the just-right grits—except for the sticky gravy, which recalled the tomato soup in its sweet-&-sour weirdness.
The Director complained his fried chicken was on the dry side; I didn't notice, finding it instead a bit greasy under another gravy that lacked finesse—but contradictorily that the side of green beans with crispy pork belly was too lipoid to quit.
The onion bread pudding on Karla’s vegetarian plate, meanwhile, was definitely too dry—a shame, because it looks like it could be a winner, eh? (I didn’t try the lookalike scalloped potatoes on the left or the celery-root puree peeking beneath the leaves.)
Finally, having named Interstate’s Candy Apple the Dish of the Week the other day, I must confess I actually preferred the charming, well-built chocolate icebox cake,
made with brownies rather than the typical wafers as well as chocolate pudding & real whipped cream.
Don't doubt we downed a number of rounds over the course of our meal, & the number wasn’t 1, 2, or 3.
Here's "Denver's premier alcoholic," in her own words, with a Standard Etiquette—whiskey, grapefruit & honey—& a mint julep.
Why the mint julep is served in a coffee mug is unclear. Is it supposed to be the roadside equivalent of the traditional pewter cup? By contrast, the logoed cozy, modeled by yet another Starz Denver Film Festival babe who happened to be whooping it up at a nearby table, makes total adorable sense.
All told, for the nonce, “Interstate” seems the perfect word for the place, as it back-and-forths between its world of commercially Platonic ideals & the real, messy world of the restaurant business. Whether it can ultimately manage to transport us between them more smoothly remains to be seen. But I'm more than willing to give it a few more whirls.






