Destination Dining: Cook Hall at the W

Operating a successful restaurant in a hotel is tricky.  If it has its own outside entrance it helps a lot, but you still have to deliver an energized dining experience in a fun setting to get local people to try it and like it and perhaps return.  Tom Colicchio's Craft is an amazing culinary experience in New York City, but its magic never transferred when the W Hotel opened with a Craft inside it in the brilliant upscale ambitious sad ghost town of Victory Park near downtown Dallas.  Maybe the opening chef should have shaved his head and yelled at people more.

Anyhoo, Craft died a slow, lingering death due to complications associated with a complete lack of visibility and prices higher than a church lady's glory knot on Sunday (the higher the hairdo, the closer to heaven it is said, amen.)  A while back Cook Hall, a clearly corporate board room conceived gastropub, arose from Craft's ashes in the hopes that its friendly price point, cheerful light bulbs and je ne sais quoi W-ness would soar where Mr. C had crash landed.

Not so much.  The room is very handsome, though most of Craft's masculine industrial chic DNA is still visible.  But they've added a big bar and strung a bunch of naked light bulbs and tacked some doo-dads around so it feels less formidably grand.

Sexy Happy Light Bulbs 

The menu is a dopey, fun read--it's the now ubiquitous "small plates" dining concept where everything is meant to be shared by urbane, chattering friends who can text and flirt and eat all at the same time (I do not possess this skill, and can brandish my grease-smeared iPhone to prove it.)  There's a smart caddy with a bunch of utensils placed next to a high stack of seven-inch plates on every table so voracious revelers are free to taste and try and savor without cross contaminating saliva.

Really, the food is quite good, better than you would think after perusing the kind of corny menu descriptions.  There was a terrific charcuterie with prosciutto and salami and pickles and some kind of tart marmalade along with toasted baguette slices.  I had two oysters that were freshly shucked and soulfully swimming in their own sweet, mollusky brine.  There was truffled mac and cheese (not very original but tasty and unheart-healthy nonetheless) and a wonderful seafood pasta with plump shrimp and snappy clams.  D ordered some sort of risotto too--so for awhile there we were speeding along in the HOV lane of the Carb Freeway.

Charcuterie, Anyone?

We had a couple of drinks and the tab was about $75 all in.  But we'll never go back.

Why, you ask, why?  Nice atmosphere, good food, moderately priced, posh W-ness...what's the problem, man?  It was the totally amateurish, hotel zombie server we had whose name I can't recall because we just kept referring to him as Waldo, as in Where the Heck is He?  The guy was one of those useless, third rate restaurant waiters who can pointlessly float around his station with his eyes wide open but not see a thing, like our empty water glasses, or that we had 34 dirty plates and utensils piled up on our table.  We would have had another cocktail but he was too busy doing absolutely nothing when he wasn't hiding in the kitchen probably texting his friends about where they could meet up after work. An assistant manager and a food runner dropped off our plates as they became ready but Waldo was studiously intent on being as useless as possible to all 6 of his tables.

Finally full of dinner and totally over the complete lack of attention, I waved him over but apparently, I was dead to him, so I stood up on the banquette and waved both arms in  semaphore, signaling we were hot to trot while he idled by the host stand.  Nope.  Finally I used my cell to call the hotel operator and asked to be transferred to Cook Hall.  Waldo answered so I cursed asked him very nicely to bring us our check.  He seemed astonished that I had stripped him of his invisibility cloak, but he managed to go to the POS system and print out our check, which he then dropped on the cluttered table as he fled the room.  For twenty-five minutes.  Not kidding, there was no one in the restaurant on a Saturday night at about 9 o'clock who could close us out and free us of purgatory.

Cook Hall, you have some real talent in the kitchen and a comfortable, cozy ambience, but with silly, untrained, uninspired and insipid servers, you will never make it as a freestanding restaurant.  That takes real Craft.