Chester White

So the peeps from Buffalo Dining Club are back with a brand-new bar. Well, they’re calling it a cured diner. It’s a smart format: a small handful of dishes to support a larger cured meat menu. There are extra sides if you want them when you order – say, the papery slices of culatello (“the king of cured meats”) – but each meat plate comes locked and loaded with chunky house-made pickles, a jacket potato, Sicilian green olives, some slices of asiago cheese and bread.

You can even order extra meat with your meat, which we do, with a side of fennel and garlic salami. This is picking food, the sort of thing you’d order with a Negroni ($15 on the chalkboard and made quick as lightning – just the way they should be) or maybe a glass of nebbiolo. You might even give the meat a miss and go straight for a bowl of kale chips and a glass of Trumer Pils.

Or there’s the ‘super bun’, two little soft sweet rolls filled with an extremely carrot-y ragu, a side of pickles, and another one of those jacket potatoes. The whole thing is kind of hard to eat, despite the attraction of the super-fun name; as we bite into the sandwich, the filling makes an escape out of the roll. Super messy.

It’s an attractive little place. Most of the inside is taken up with a grand counter of glossy tiles lined with big comfy retro diner chairs lit by '40s-style frosted glass shades which hang overhead. The only other decorations are the hanging salumi (it’s a shame our waiter can’t tell us where they’re from when the whole premise of the place is about the meat) and a poster of a cool pig wearing sunglasses.

For our dollar, we’d like to see Chester White simplify even further: lose all the other stuff on the plate ($19 a pop with all the fair-to-middling trimmings), and concentrate on the meats. You can always swing by just for one of those Negronis - you'll be in and out before we have time to say 'high on the hog'.