Pure Cafe

Fun bar!
Great music, great crowd (not too many people, you can actually sit down and have a conversation), great service! Location is the only reason why i didn't give 5 stars.

Great music, great crowd (not too many people, you can actually sit down and have a conversation), great service! Location is the only reason why i didn't give 5 stars.

I hate to do this, but I have to.  This is a place that wants to be good, but hasn't nailed down what it really is.

Eight o'clock on a Saturday...but no regular crowd shuffling in.  Just our party of 7 or so, looking for a decent dinner.  Get the menu...clearly some central European influence (the men's room indicates it's Croatian), but a lot of Italian and some Mex-Tex offerings.

I got a traditional Martini, dirty; pretty decent, moderately high price, but OK.

The table goes for appetizers--fried calamari, some hummus & sides, and chicken wings purportedly with habanero & sweet sauce.  Well, the calamari wasn't rubbery, but the breading was doughy & soggy; pass after the first taste.  The hummus was watery; pass.  And the chicken wing were covered with a kind of a grey goo.  Taste wasn't bad, but if there was habanero there, it was in homeopathic concentration.

Not too hungry, nor too sanguine about the absolutely-nobody-else-in-the-place ambiance, so I figure I'll go with something simple--pasta with mushrooms.  Others went for burgers, with a flatbread and shrimp & rice.

Somebody in the kitchen loved salt.  Seriously.  The pasta was way past al dente, and seriously sodium enriched.  The mushrooms--normal white button, pretty tasteless but sparked some debate if they were canned or just oversauteed fresh; the latter won, but by a hair.  Otherwise, it was overcooked pasta, butter, and mushy mushrooms.  Period.  (Hint, guys--cut the salt in the pasta water.  Don't cook it to mush.  Sautee the mushrooms with a little garlic, basil, oregano, and port or marsala.  I love butter, but that can't be the whole thing.)

The shrimp & salt--er, rice.  Again, somebody really loved the salt cellar.  The flatbread wasn't half bad, really--although ordered without onions, so the person ordering wasn't happy the onions actually seriously helped it.  And everyone who ordered a burger said it was really good--a bit salty, but that worked with the meat.  (But are you getting a trend here?)

The server and other staff we talked were friendly, and they did give some credit for the problems.  But I'd have to suggest this isn't the place to go if your primary purpose is food--the bar looks good, the band setting up around 9PM was promising.  Go for drinks and partying.  Suggestion to the kitchen--drop anything beyond pub grub until you've got the entree thing down, some better recipes, and someone sits on the salt monster.