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Restaurant review: St. Pete's Urban Comfort needs some tinkering

 
The fried chicken at Urban Comfort in St. Petersburg is a solid offering. The restaurant is housed inside a former 
1950s-era gas station.
The fried chicken at Urban Comfort in St. Petersburg is a solid offering. The restaurant is housed inside a former 1950s-era gas station.
Published Aug. 3, 2015

ST. PETERSBURG

Andy Salyards thinks big. He opened Urban Brew and BBQ toward the end of 2013 having little barbecue experience, but assured in the knowledge that he was filling a hole in the St. Pete dining scene. He would load up his Cookshack smoker late evening and come morning the fragrant meats were ready to eat, but what really drew regulars to his little Grand Central hangout was his passion for craft beer, especially local craft beer. That, and the skillet mac and cheese.

He announced at the beginning of the year that he had bought a 1950s-era gas station nearby and was renovating it to debut concept No. 2: Urban Comfort, a comfort food restaurant and brewpub. As these things often go, it took longer than anticipated to get the doors open. In June it debuted, just not yet with the brewery portion of the program. Joining the other five St. Pete breweries, it will be the city's only brewpub, with a seven-barrel system with three barrel fermenters and four seven-barrel serving tanks.

For now, though, the restaurant still feels like a work in progress. This may be because Salyards is splitting his time between two busy restaurants, or maybe because he and his wife have a 3-month-old. Regardless, the new restaurant feels a little unfinished, with a very short menu and some odd holes. (For example, the phone number doesn't seem to work, the website doesn't have all the menus or the hours, and while craft beers are represented and there's a short Southern-inspired cocktail list, there's no wine at all.)

In a couple of visits I ate my way through pretty much the whole menu, and I would say that the serving pieces don't do the food any favors. Aluminum trays lined with paper are a lousy medium for a pork chop ($16) you're going to have to cut (you cut into the paper and worry about eating it) or for a juicy watermelon salad with red onion, mint, fluffs of feta and an overly inky-sweet balsamic syrup ($6). And mason jars, which are ubiquitous these days in the area, make for cumbersome eating of a biscuit-based strawberry shortcake ($6). It's a battle to reach your spoon down and get a cross section of the dessert, so you end up eating way too many bites of slightly waxy whipped cream before getting to the good stuff.

That's not a big deal, but I worry a bit about the price point. There's a very solid fried chicken (juicy interior, fairly thick crunchy batter, very greaseless), again rammed into a too-small paper-lined basket so it's almost impossible to easily cut into, but I wonder if $16 is a little steep in a market that has gotten so competitive recently. It tips into memorable territory with a little ramekin of honey hot sauce, but you've got to pay an extra buck for that.

There's a homey chicken pot pie ($12, they also offer a vegetarian version), the bechamel-style sauce cradling familiar veggies (peas, carrot, potato) and big shreds of white-meat chicken (and a few unfortunate bone pieces). Its top is more biscuit than pastry, but the overall effect, served in a super-hot cast iron skillet, is inviting and old-timey. Same goes for the house hush puppies and biscuits, both fairly airy and light examples of their species, the former offered as a side to the solid fried fish of the day (market price, but mine was $16) or as an appetizer with a somewhat incongruous smoked Gouda sauce ($5).

The single best menu item is the fried green tomatoes ($7), offered at lunch as the centerpiece of a BLT ($12), the rounds with the right tang, the cornmeal breading crisp and their accompanying smoked paprika-bumped sauce a perfect foil. Ditch the greens that get instantly frizzled by the hot tomatoes and it's a contender for top green tomatoes in town.

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Salyards has big plans for this sprawling indoor-outdoor newcomer: housemade beers, shuffleboard teams, etc. But I think the food and beverage menus need some bolstering and breadth (pot pies, pork and dumplings, and even shrimp and grits seem so heavy as we head into August) before it hits the high marks of Salyards' flagship restaurant.

Contact Laura Reiley at lreiley@tampabay.com or (727) 892-2293. Follow @lreiley on Twitter. She dines anonymously and unannounced; the Times pays all expenses.