Feb. 18, 2005

Murray's Bar and Grill -- calories with class
If you've ever floated the Jordan River, you know how lovely and peaceful it is. The sense of solitude takes on a whole new dimension in winter, dfirting through a landscape of snow and ice. That's how we recently experienced it with Scott and Kay Harper, the canoe-livery folks at Jordan Valley Outfitters. Their winter trips, in 8-person inflatables, come complete with tea and cocoa brewed riverside on a camp stove.

Here's a tip for when you get off the river: Stay a while in East Jordan and warm up at Murray's Bar and Grill. This classic up-north tavern comes complete with wood paneling, big-screen TV, beer ads on the wall, and a chill along the floor whenever someone enters or leaves. But any resemblance to the typical saloon stops cold at the menu. Murray's serves some of the freshest and most satisfying bar food we've ever found.

They're understandably proud of it, too, as we discovered when as we asked our server, Tanya, about the menu. Most of her replies were something like, "And that's home made," or, "We make it ourselves," or "It's done to order."

This is not your basic deep-fried, formula bar food right off the jobber's truck. But don't get the idea that it's just effete, frou-frou, heart-healthy broiled fish and steamed vegetables. What it is is unabashed calories and cholesterol. It has all the heft you expect from a tavern. Murray's is so unabashed about heft that when another reporter described her burger as "a greasy, salty, cheesy hunk of beef," Murray's proudly quoted her on its website.

We have to disagree with her assessment, however. We had one of those burgers, and it wasn't at all greasy or salty. It was huge, all right, and beefy and laden with good white cheddar. And Lord, was it flavorful! Perfectly pink inside, as Sherri had ordered, this burger's half-pound slab of black Angus was stacked with crisp, fresh lettuce, thick tomato slices and huge crescents of sweet, white onion inside a big Kaiser roll that had been smash-browned on the grill. It came plated with a token tub of slaw and a fistful of crunchy, thick, house-made potato chips. To the sort of appetite that comes from a winter day on a river, that isn't just calories and cholesterol. It's hamburger heaven. These calories have class.

Tanya, we learned later, is Tanya Cetnarowski. She's a local. So are the chef and sous chef, Jim and Kirt Ploe, 20-something brothers with no formal training who are responsible for the menu, which varies with the seasons. They learned the trade on the job, at Petoskey's Noggin Room and Bay Harbor's Yacht Club.

The proprietors, Emily Murray and her fiancé Owen Welsh, live over the bar and believe in keeping things local. As a teenager in Charlevoix she was a salad girl at the old Parkside and hostess at the Harbor Vista Café. Owen, whom she met at Michigan State, waited tables and tended bar through college. Their only other link to the restaurant business is a stepbrother owns the Shamrock Bar on Beaver Island.

Murray's is hardly a hotbed of formal training in culinary discipline. It's the sort of place that does for food what barrelhouse piano did for American music. But who cares about the chef's credentials when you're tucking into a 12-inch quesadilla stuffed with black beans, avocado, roasted red peppers and three cheeses, and topped with his homemade tomato salsa and jalapeno-orange marmalade?

The Ploe brothers' chili is just as distinctive ¾ chock-a-block with beef, red beans and shredded cheddar, light on the cumin, and with the texture and color of Cincinnati-style chili without the spaghetti, the onions or cloying cinnamon flavor. That said, however, we're suspect that if those are your preferences, the kitchen would gladly customize it. "If you want to add or omit, we're on it." Emily Murray told us. "And we like home made."

Indeed! Besides those potato chips, they also make their own tortilla chips and spinach-artichoke dip.

Murray's food is certainly familiar; anyone who spends much time in saloons would recognize that they speak the same basic language of burgers, fish-and-chips, and grilled cheese. But it's an unusually refined dialect. What was the last barroom that gave you chargrilled chicken marinated in lemon and herbs and served on mushroom linguine? Or fried calamari with homemade cocktail sauce and chili-garlic aioli?

"We eat out a lot," Emily said. "We realized that everybody seemed to be doing the same kind of thing. We wanted to think outside the box . . . put our own spin on things."

But, said Emily, even if your saloon serves grilled whitefish with Chablis butter, "People always judge a restaurant by the quality of their hamburgers." If that's so, then our judgment is that Murray's has it knocked.

DATA: Murray's Bar and Grill, 115 Main St., East Jordan; 231-536-3395. Burgers, sandwiches, salads in the $4-7 range, pastas $9 or so, and plated entrees $7-15. Daily, lunch and dinner.