Dining Review: Club Frills in Providence

A retro trip back in time where the bar food measures up to its liquor laboratory.

11 hours ago

Karen Deutsch,

Jesse Hedberg prepares a Deviled Ramos Jell-O shot. Photography by Angel Tucker

There are two type of people in Club Frills: those who enter it as a time warp, the virtual reality of an era they’ve never personally known other than through photos of their parents or grandparents in low-slung hip-huggers. And then there are those who experience it viscerally, walking into their own dim wood-paneled basement where life turned to Technicolor on Friday evenings.

Snyder’s salad served with a Jaune Jawn cocktail. Photography by Angel Tucker

Like a 1970s house in the American suburbs, the exterior of Club Frills is entirely unremarkable. Once the pastel-hued home of PVDonuts, the Ives Street building is now painted muddy brown with no sign of life from the street. It’s two doors in, through a glass block entryway, before you walk over the retro “Be My Guest” welcome mat and face the plywood podium where a guy sporting an achy-breaky mullet greets you like his first cousin. But in contrast to the intense attitude that Club Frills puts out — a pervasively dark room punctuated by neon lights suggesting a kick-ass party — the staff is downright perky.

Maybe it’s connected to the fact that nearly everyone is drinking, but the family creed at Club Frills seems to be that a good attitude makes for a good bar. Despite the almost uncannily authentic decor — Keno behind the bar, a “Claw Daddy” claw machine in the back dining room, and an array of needlepoint and hook-rug artwork — this place is looking to nail diversity on a nightly basis. Plenty of diners cascade in fully inked, but tables are also filled with groups of barely twenty-ones in tennis skirts, as well as grandparents proudly telling a server that they had bumper pool in their own wood-paneled basement. Music skips around from Ratt and Guns N’ Roses to Boz Scaggs and Texas surf — a playlist that’s as eclectic as the bar menu.

Club Frills is, after all, the second child of Pizza Marvin’s Robert Andreozzi and Jesse Hedberg, who are building an empire that thrives on underground energy in a mainstream location. (Just check out Instagram where one Frills lover shouted out Hedberg by saying “I had the best cocktail of my life tonight and this [mother-$%^&-er] also made my second favorite cocktail ever.”) While the vibe of the room is insistently casual, the drinks are anything but. They’re designed to surprise and impress and they do so with ease at the table and hours of prep before they land.

The interior of Club Frills. Photography by Angel Tucker

Bartender Kayleigh Speck prepares the Pere Ube cocktail. Photography by Angel Tucker

Cocktails are clarified, carbonated, fermented and distilled — anything to make them different and everything to push the ingredients past their indigenous qualities. The Krusher is a grown-up snow cone — a mountain of crushed ice with Campari and fruit juice that’s more bitter than sweet but goes down just as easily as its progenitor. Jaune Jawn, which arrives in a coupe glass, smells like a fresh bell pepper but drinks like a pineapple Sour Patch Kid. High Horse — with Granny Smith apple, hydro-horseradish and “strange-flavored Eastern European vodka” — is an off-kilter Jolly Rancher in drink form. The (seasonally retired) Barbarella mixes rhubarb and cherry blossom, and is clarified with cream cheese, a full-tilt Willy Wonka experience that goes down like a cream cheese and jelly sandwich in liquid form.

Even the flawless ice cubes demand attention as they lounge in glasses, crushed, massively cubed or in pristine spears. A cocktail runs about sixteen dollars and you’ll want to drink several in a seating (plan accordingly), alongside the house Jell-O shot based on a gin fizz that pairs gin, condensed milk and gelatin into a hard-boiled-egg mold.

But Frills is not just for drinkers. Chef Nikhil Naiker was tasked with creating bar food that could go up against Hedberg’s liquor laboratory, and the results are reimagined retro snacks. On the chic side, beef tartare is served in tiny tacos — tartacos ($18) — mixed with taco seasoning and garnished with nacho cheese, and the roe-topped corn dogs are filled with seafood sausage made of scallops, lobster and fish ($18). (There’s an option to top it with Osetra for sixty bucks because this is fantasy land, and it seems totally legit after pounding candy-colored cocktails.)

The interior of Club Frills. Photography by Angel Tucker

A tuna club. Photography by Angel Tucker

But most of the food is, like Pizza Marvin, a low-brow idea in a high-brow body. Chewy fries ($13) are footlong fries with added potato starch that eat like mochi breadsticks with ranch dip, and the oozie doozie — which appear to be onion rings — are, in fact, mozzarella rings fried in batter and served with barbecue sauce ($14). Even Naiker’s chicken nuggets look like a Shake & Bake fever dream, though they’re paired with pickled celery and dehydrated
Buffalo powder ($16). The menu isn’t a light one, but the salt and fat are perfect pairings for the cocktails. If you’re compelled to avoid the fryolator, the Snyder’s salad ($14) is a heaping bowl of mixed greens in mustard vinaigrette with a shower of fresh dill fronds and a hefty dose of Snyder’s honey mustard pretzel “croutons.” It’s the simplest dish on the menu but it’s oddly addictive with no guilt attached.

There’s also a trio of sandwich icons — Philly cheesesteak, tuna club and an all-American burger — that Naiker decided to go Pygmalion on. The cheesesteak has been replaced with mushrooms, but loaded with Cooper Sharp and cherry peppers ($19); it’s a worthy meat-free rendition of the classic. The club ($28) swaps in bluefin tuna, a yolky fried egg and a heaping drizzle of Thousand Island-style dressing, which makes this modern version an exercise in finger licking. It’s the ubiquitous burger ($21), though, that holds the secrets. Naiker confits the patty in beef fat before searing it off so, uhhhhhhh, just sit with that for a bit.

Is there a limit to this insanity? Noooope. Not here. It’s a fun house that plays off an identifiable motif but one that also looks for every chance to upend expectations. That being said, neither side of Club Frills’ divergent personality eclipses the other. There are a lot of surprises, but it’s still a neighborhood hangout that thrives on familiar faces and an almost illimitable optimism. In other words, it gives bars a good name.

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