Review: Blue Canyon Kitchen, Tavern & Wine Bar

Deviled eggs are fussed up with crab and topped with a Spanish olive slice that looks like a dilated eyeball startled by trooper spotlights after a hard night of rum. It rests in a disappointingly dry, stiff yolk whip. Our tuna carpaccio with gazpacho somehow turned into the sashimi big eye tuna with a green papaya slaw, though it wasn't sashimi either. It's a big hunk of fish loin seared so that the clean, tender raw is several layers deep down.

Trout crusted in pulverized pretzel and bathed in whole grain mustard butter is by far the most successful Blue Canyon composition, if you don't count that beautifully ham-handed risotto. A fried basil leaf crowns a sprawl of pearly trout, fanned and sloping and pocked with a birdshot of capers. The fish blankets a bumpy miscellany of red potatoes and wilted spinach in pesto.

Spiced nuts and shards and fragments of chewy, brittle bacon make the Bibb lettuce wedge a turn of brilliance on this steakhouse cliché. Fluffy fans of leaf drip murky blue cheese dressing soiled with nut and bacon 0crumble adding a maple-smoke musk to the complexion.

For dessert we finished with sorbets: berry and mango, scooped into ice cream cones, arranged in a stilted row over a long narrow plate. House-made? No, says our server, house-prepared. House-scooped, perhaps.

No matter, these Blue Canyon kinks grow on you if you relax and let them. The kitsch may make you wince a little, but if you fix your eyes on the calm Ray Hubbard shimmers, you'll find this New American cuisine shot through a Smith & Wesson via Ohio is more alluring than disconcerting. And you can't refuse that offer.