Foodsday Tuesday:* Straight to the Pourhouse

(Ross Currie)

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*Yes, it's Wednesday. But we needed some extra time to prepare our new Foodsday Tuesday feature, Quick Nosh, which will feature snack-sized servings of food news that we couldn't dedicate a full post to. Check out the first one at the bottom of this post. Got a Philly food tip? Send 'em over!

As an undergrad, I did my best to avoid the corner of 38th and Ludlow, then the home of Brownie's, one of the cheaper options available to Penn students looking to drink themselves into bad situations. I begin this post with that statement not to wax nostalgic about college bars I did and didn't like, but rather because Brownie's isn't there anymore. What is there, after the closure of another failed bar, is The Blockley Pourhouse, a gastropubby music venue named for University City's former name, before the neighborhood fell (rose?) to widespread Penntrification.

In many ways, The Blockely is quite a departure from its sink-or-swim college bar antecedents (a solid menu; clean bathrooms), but the space could only distance itself from Brownie's so much (Bud Light on tap; echoey, cavernous space). In a city full of intimate, quirky, bars with solid food that feel packed to the gills with crowds of forty, The Blockely manages to feel completely vacant with a crowd twice that size. No walls have been added to break up the former dance club's space—possibly because The Blockley intends to be a live music venue with good sight lines—and so standing in the middle of the bar feels like standing in an empty (but very, very loud) room. The space is problematic for more than just its size, though: the restaurant's website makes much of the building's macabre history as a "mental institution," and the renovated space tries to allude to that with its concrete floors and the heavy door that separates the main bar from the adjoining fine-dining-restaurant-to-be (formerly the home of Brownie's second, smaller stage) and the "Blockley-as-a-microcosm" faceless photographs on the bathroom doors—but everything feels too new. Plus, the communal-style dining tables (perhaps meant to allude to a hospital cafeteria?) feature very deep picnic-style benches that require quite a bit of maneuvering to sit on, especially when one end is pushed against the wall.

But enough of the space; what of the menu? Our meal was off to a dismal start when our waitress told us what was on tap: for a place called The Blockley Pourhouse, we were expecting more microbrews. Instead we were greeted with University City standards (the aforementioned Bud Light; Guiness) and microbrews-in-name-only (Sam Adams). There were a few local brews, sure, but nothing surprising or unexpected or beer snobby. A surprise amuse bouche was presented with our beers: foie gras with slightly overpowering cherries. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I like my foie to taste like foie, and the perfect texture of Blockley's offering (soon to be a featured app at the previously mentioned restaurant next door) was drowned in sweetness.

Things were rescued substantially, though, when our appetizers (called "Snacks" on the menu) appeared on the table. The Jerked Chicken "Nuggets" ($6) were the perfect combination of smoky and spicy, served with a slightly sweet, slightly sour pineapple chutney that tied everything on the plate together, and the Lobster Pierogies ($8), while not all that lobster-y, were all you could ever want from a pierogie without going up to the Polish restaurants in Port Richmond.