Does a pimiento bacon cheeseburger say ‘Fort Worth’? It does at a downtown restaurant
Downtown’s busiest brunch is always at Bird Café, and there’s a reason.
When the handsome restaurant lined with treasured bird paintings originally opened as a gastropub, it was more fun and flavorful for lunch and brunch than for the beer-driven evening menu.
New chef Brian Olenjack is helping fix all that.
A new Bird lunch menu is already in place. Soon, a winter dinner menu will make Bird seem more worthy of its location catty-cornered to Bass Hall.
No, the grilled cheese sandwich didn’t go away. But some new lunch items seem influenced by Olenjack, a former chef at Reata and at a past Worthington Renaissance hotel steakhouse.
The new Bird lunch menu is much broader and now includes seven salads, along with a turkey-Gruyère cheeseburger with chipotle aioli and fries ($14).
The sandwich showcase is now a ”Fort Worth burger,” a bacon-pimiento cheeseburger with fries ($16).
Of course, there’s a fried chicken sandwich, this one with coffee glaze ($13). It’s just as good as the fried chicken on the weekend brunch chicken-and-waffles ($18).
Olenjack’s familar shrimp-and-grits also makes its Bird debut as a lunch item with jalapeno gravy ($23).
He’ll add more steak specials, chops and Southwestern dishes as the dinner menu evolves.
The weekend brunch menu hasn’t changed much yet. The highlights are the almond pancakes ($14), omelets, egg dishes, the burger and a BLT with fried green tomatoes ($13).
Desserts change daily, but recent offerings included pecan pie, milk-chocolate pecan pie, Key lime pie and chocolate layer cake.
Bird is serving its own version of a Thanksgiving lunch: smoked turkey with gravy, sweet-potato hash, two fried eggs and a side of pumpkin-brioche French toast with mascarpone cream. For dessert: a pumpkin pie parfait with a ginger-cookie crumble.
(For a more traditional Thanksgiving, look to the prime steakhouses nearby. Del Frisco’s Double Eagle and Mercury Chophouse still had good availability as of last weekend, and the Omni Hotel’s huge brunch had some space available. Toro Toro Latin Steakhouse will be open and will serve some sort of special but not a Thanksgiving dinner.)
Check with Bird for more information at 817-332-2473; 155 E. Fourth St., birdinthe.net.
This story was originally published November 19, 2019 at 5:45 AM.
