If you need proof that a whiskey bar can hide a serious kitchen in its back pocket, Barrel Proof on…read moreMagazine Street will make the case, and it will make it with a roast beef sandwich. The food comes from rotating pop-up kitchens that operate out of the back. The night we went it was Matchbook Kitchen, an Asian fusion menu from Justin Bruhl, who grew up in Massachusetts and cooked in Boston for years, and then moved to New Orleans, where he worked at Compère Lapin and Maypop before starting his pop-up here. Matchbook runs Saturday through Monday, and a Sunday night turned out to be a very good time to find it.
A whiskey bar with a rotating kitchen is a slightly improbable idea on paper. The place is built around its bottles, and a guest kitchen that changes could easily mean an afterthought. This did not feel like one, and Magazine Street is not short on places to eat, so a bar has to give you a reason.
We both ordered the Szechuan roast beef dip, $14 apiece. The bread was soft, the beef was tender, and the cheese was melted just enough to hold things together without turning the sandwich into a casserole. All of it was cooked right, and nothing about the construction was showy, which let the jus take the lead. But the dip is the whole point of a dip, and the Szechuan hot pot jus is where this sandwich earns its keep. It has real depth, and it carries the tingling numbness that people promise when they talk about Szechuan hot pot and that most restaurants never deliver. Anyone who has been promised numbness by a menu and felt nothing will understand why this mattered. Here it arrives on schedule, and as promised. The jus was exceptional on its own. Once the sandwich went into it, the whole thing got better in a way I did not see coming.
We added an order of smashed potatoes, about $4, which came with a dipping sauce I believe was some kind of aioli. I cannot tell you what was in it, because we ignored it and dragged the potatoes through the hot pot jus instead. That is not a knock on the aioli. it's a measure of how good the jus was, and for about $4, the potatoes were the cheapest way I could think of to carry more of it to my mouth. The sandwiches were a perfect size, neither too big nor too small, and everything reached us in under ten minutes. At $14 for the sandwich and about $4 for the potatoes, the bill never gave me a reason to look up from the food.
You order from a counter at the back of the bar, just outside the kitchen, then claim a stool. We sat at the bar on a Sunday night, a little before dinner time, with a steady crowd drifting in. It was not a rush, but it never thinned out either, which seems like the pace a bar like this is built for. A projector at one end of the bar was showing a sporting event early on. Later the screen rolled up and the music took over, a steady rotation of AM gold, Motown, and disco, which is the correct soundtrack for a dim room full of whiskey. The room is dark, but never in an oppressive or off-putting way. The focal point is the whiskey itself, and there is so much of it that the bar keeps its catalog on an iPad.
The bartenders are extremely friendly, and I want that word in capital letters. They took the time to answer a stream of questions from other customers about different whiskeys at different price points. My wife started with a margarita, which was good, and it is a margarita, so there is only so much room to mess it up. After dinner she wanted dessert but didn't want to go anywhere else, so she asked if they could make something dessert adjacent. They asked her a few questions and built her a chocolate espresso martini. That is the detail I keep returning to. Asking a bar for dessert and getting an actual conversation about what you like, followed by a drink made for you, is hospitality you cannot fake with a training manual.
As for myself, I don't drink, and Barrel Proof has mocktails on offer, which matters when you are a non-drinker at a bar that has a staggering wall of whiskey on display. I had the mocktail old fashioned, which was quite good. Non-alcoholic whiskey drinks are hard, and this was as respectable a mocktail old fashioned as I have had anywhere else.
I would go back in a heartbeat, and I would be happy to do it without a drop of alcohol in my glass. Picture me at the bar with a mocktail, a book, and a couple of friendly bartenders to talk to, waiting on a roast beef dip. The place works whether or not you drink, and I would take a stool on a Sunday and stay awhile. If you are in the neighborhood on a Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, order the Szechuan roast beef dip, add the smashed potatoes, and save plenty of jus for dunking. Matchbook is a pop-up, so check that it is running before you go. Between the sandwiches, the potatoes, and three very different drinks, nothing on our end of the bar let us down.
