Review: Five Points

The beer-battered cod dinner with sweet and sour cole slaw, fries and homemade tartar sauce served at the Five Points restaurant. (Credit: Sam Upshaw Jr.)

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My favorite food publication is “Petits Propos Culinaires,” a British magazine founded by late food historian Alan Davidson (editor of the estimable “Oxford Companion to Food”). PPC, as it’s called, is devoted to ferreting out quirky historical tidbits like the best recipes for cooking Ugandan termites, or how to avoid “snirping” — the tendency of fish filets to curl when dropped in hot fat (some British fish and chips experts claim you should cook the fish skin side down; others, as it happens, claim just the opposite).

Even the most dedicated food historian might have a hard time tracing the history of the Chenoweth Square building that now houses Five Points St. Matthews. For a long time it was called Rick’s. Then it was Indigo. Since then it’s been called Rick’s Ferrari Grill, Gilman’s Point and Wathen’s. There might have been a few other names to boot. And now it’s Five Points, a name that celebrates the convergence of five major roads at the heart of St. Matthews.

Stepping into Five Points for the first time is rather like playing one of those role-playing games where your fate is determined by a series of choices that often involve a door. Enter the antechamber, for instance, and a sign points you to the left (“Restaurant”) or right (“Bar”). Head left, and you find yourself in a lonely cul-de-sac that looks out on a pleasantly appointed dining room. If you wait a bit, you’ll eventually be discovered and led to a table. Otherwise, you can back up and go the other way, where you’ll land in a very convivial bar with plenty of sturdy wood surfaces, a bright aquarium and a mix of comfortable seating.

If you sit at a table, you may encounter service that’s cheerful but confused. When told that Browning’s beers were on tap, we asked, “Which ones?” Stumped, our server hollered out to another staffer, who asked another staffer, who eventually asked the bartender, who relayed the news that it was, in fact, She Devil. (Any veteran of role-playing games knows not to repeat one’s mistakes, so on another visit I headed straight to the bar, where service was quick and confident despite a bustling crowd.)

The menu is a brief but odd blend of standard pub fare (burgers and chili) with more ambitious bistro options (escargot and mussels). Entrees include pan-seared mahi-mahi, Creole-inflected pasta, grilled salmon; sandwich choices include a Reuben, a steak sandwich and a portobello on focaccia.

And it must be said that the best choices are the simplest: stick with reliable standards. A burger ($8) had a pleasantly charred exterior and good flavor; the dressings were fresh, bright and crisp; the bun was hefty enough to handle the job. An iceberg wedge ($6) was decorated with bacon and red onion, and though it’s hardly a test of skills, was plated with pride.

The same couldn’t be said for a gloomy bowl of onion soup ($3/$5). The beefy broth and caramelized onions were warming and comfortable, but the dish was an object lesson in how not to present a dish. The broth formed a shallow pool at the bottom of a wide bowl. Floating on the surface were two slices of soggy, spongy bread. And spread across the top was a pale layer of cheese that had been heated enough to melt, but not enough to develop even a hint of color.

Much better was puffy, golden, beer-battered cod (sandwich, $8; dinner, $13) that showed no signs whatsoever of snirping, and was as moist and pleasant as one could wish. An 8-ounce sirloin ($18) could have been trimmed to remove its sheath of fat, but it was cooked precisely as ordered — and would have been quite lovely but for an unsightly light brown sauce that tasted vaguely of bourbon.

Still, all’s well that ends well, and Chef Cory Givan does offer a darned good dessert. From toothsome pastry dough and juicy apples, he crafts fried apple pie wontons ($6) that burst with fall flavor and are sprinkled with cinnamon and sparkling sugar.

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