McKinney Ave. Tavern

By KIM HARWELL
As restaurants go, the McKinney Avenue Tavern makes a great bar.
The MAT, as it's called, melds a classy setting with a sports bar vibe. A 10-foot projection TV, flanked by four smaller sets, is the centerpiece of the main dining room. More televisions are scattered about the multilevel space, and more big screens are promised in time for football season. A long, elevated bar takes up one side of the casual eatery and pub; the rest of the room is broken into smaller areas accented with video games, a pool table and the like.
Out front, flower-filled window boxes separate the small patio from the passing McKinney Avenue traffic.
Drink specials are plentiful. Weekday happy hour runs from 4 to 7 p.m. and includes $2 domestic pints and $2.75 well drinks, among other bargains. (There's also a free buffet, but it didn't coincide with our visits.) Frozen margaritas are $2 on Thursday nights.
If you stick to soaking up the atmosphere and doing a bit of tippling, your time at the MAT will undoubtedly be well spent. If you plan on dining ... well, you could do worse.
The menu is chock-full of standard bar fare – chicken fingers, nachos, Buffalo wings, burgers – along with an array of salads and sandwiches.
On one visit, we ordered an appetizer of jalapeño poppers ($6.95), which arrived with our entrees. Stuffed with molten cream cheese, the breaded, fried peppers were so hot from the deep-fryer that we couldn't sample them until well after we had tucked into the main course. When we did get a chance to nibble, we found pretty standard stuff – too much breading, not enough kick to the peppers. Boneless Buffalo wings ($7.95) were a bigger disappointment. Instead of tender chicken wings, we got chicken planks plastered with tough, dry breading and dressed with a lackluster hot sauce. Sigh.
A burger ($5.95) would have been a success had it been cooked correctly. Ordered medium-rare, the meat arrived medium-well, though still tasty. Melted American cheese (50 cents extra), a soft bun, crisp lettuce and fresh tomatoes were all laudable; the absence of pickles seemed curious. Curly fries came alongside, and while they were prefab and underseasoned, we managed to polish off a good portion of them.
The "chef's pasta" (available as a special, $9.95) was a large bowl of fettuccine tossed with small wheels of Italian sausage, bell peppers, onions and mushrooms in a good, if routine, marinara sauce, topped with a rather bland sliced chicken breast.
The same grilled chicken breast made an appearance atop the Indonesian salad ($6.95) – a surprise, since this bird was described on the menu as being "Asian five-spice chicken." Romaine lettuce, bell peppers and carrots were fresh to a fault, but the promised crispy won tons – not to mention those five Asian spices – were nowhere to be found. Worse, the peanut dressing that cloaked the dish was a cloying sauce more suited to a satay than a salad.
We returned for lunch, interested in checking out the $6.95 weekday specials touted on the menu. When we arrived we were told there was one special: a chicken club, listed on the blackboard with curly fries for only $5.95. We didn't have high hopes for the sandwich, a chicken breast surrounded by two kinds of cheese, smoky bacon, lettuce and tomato on soft, untoasted pumpernickel bread. But after one bite we were hooked – all the flavors blended together into an unqualified hit. The curly fries that rounded out the plate weren't any more impressive than previously, but, to be fair, there weren't any left on the plate when we finally surrendered it.
Service was spotty. On a Saturday night, our waitress was friendly and accommodating but knew the answers to none of our questions. No stumpers here: We wanted to know what stuffing was in the jalapeño and what cider was advertise...