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This Spitfire is more than a movie of the week.

By Charles Ferruzza 

I confess that I've never seen the 1996 movie The Spitfire Grill, although friends extol the virtues of the film about a young girl finding a new life working in a little Maine diner. In the case of the new Spitfire Grill on 39th Street, Marc Cantrell's tiny bistro isn't a diner by any means (although it does serve sandwiches, fries and banana pudding — as well as fancier dishes), but it does have a theatrical quality that may make some patrons wonder if they've accidentally stepped onto a movie set or a reality TV show. After eating several meals in the restaurant, I'm still wondering myself.

Cantrell — who also operates Cheesehead Sandwiches downtown — turned the storefront space formerly occupied by the Addis Aba Ethiopian Café into a cozy, oddball dining room with faux stone-block walls. It's a bit of King Tutankhamen's tomb, shaken together with a small-town sports bar and populated with characters straight out of Central Casting. During one of my visits, on a sweltering Tuesday night, every chair at the bar was taken by someone who looked vaguely familiar. Not familiar from my real life, but rather from some half-forgotten movie or sitcom episode. A pretty female bartender held court to a chubby older man; a chain-smoking middle-aged woman with a throaty laugh; a gone-to-seed former jock swilling beer; a nubile young brunette in a flirty satin dress; and a skinny, nerdy guy in glasses and a polyester shirt buttoned to the collar. And they all seemed to know one another, as if this chummy little bar were their regular watering hole.

"How long has this restaurant been here?" asked my friend Patrick, staring at the motley crew from our table on the other side of the room.

A couple of months, I told him. Patrick looked stunned: "This bar crowd looks as if they've been coming here for years. Like they're part of the décor."

Since there's not much in the way of décor — if you don't count the pretend stone walls, the built-in rotisserie oven, the uncloaked tables and the fringed drum light fixtures — the regulars and the attractive young servers give the Spitfire Grill a feeling of vitality and fun. Another friend, less charmed by the place than I was, calls it "the weirdest restaurant on 39th Street," which is, in my opinion, a rather sweeping statement. She clearly wasn't thinking of the far more eccentric Bell Street Mama's across the street or the late, lamented Nichols Lunch when she moved the Spitfire Grill to the top of her weirdo list. It doesn't even earn a mention on my list of weird restaurants, but that's an idea for another story.

It says something about the success of Cantrell's concept that I took several of my most critical dining companions with me on each of my four visits to the restaurant, including the unapologetically snooty Bill, and they all liked it — even Bill, who insisted the interior décor reminded him of one of the cheap Saturday-morning serials he watched as a kid at the old Gladstone Theatre. Something with a mad scientist, I think.

The restaurant has a few good things going for it, thanks mostly to the talents of chef Brian Curry, the mad scientist in the tiny kitchen who puts out some surprisingly tasty meals and a terrific Sunday-morning brunch. Curry's menu isn't elaborate. It's just good, solid bistro fare: an invigorating French onion soup, organic roasted chicken stuffed with rosemary and thyme, steamed mussels, and something called "cheese fondue with potato gnocchi" — it's not served in a festive little pot, but it's definitely gooey with molten cheeses.

The word fondue — from the French fondre, meaning "melt" — evokes a specific kind of dish in the Midwest: the kind served at the Melting Pot. Curry's version is a plate of thumb-sized potato dumplings (not the kind that seem as if they'd float off the plate, alas) blanketed with a bubbly cheese sauce, rich with aged Gruyère and Fontina d'Aosta. I liked both it and the variation made with macaroni and served as a side dish. Call it fondue if you want — I call it upscale mac and cheese.

And there's nothing like a spoonful of cheesy macaroni eaten with this restaurant's very Midwestern signature dishes: a nice, juicy slab of roasted prime rib and meaty barbecued pork ribs. I'm one of those unabashed carnivores who craves a hunk of hot, pink rib roast once or twice a year ... and only when I can't think of a place to get it. The casino steakhouses all have very good (and cheap) prime-rib dinners, but the Spitfire's version can hold its own with the best of them. After indulging in a little gnocchi action before dinner, I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to finish even the 12-ounce slice of rib, but it was too luscious not to polish off.

My friend Bob gave thumbs up to the fine pork ribs, slathered with a mildly sweet (and Budweiser-enhanced) barbecue sauce, while Patrick greedily tore into the succulent roasted chicken, enjoying every moist, garlicky bite. It reminded me of a bird I had eaten in a similar neighborhood bistro in Paris, but at today's exchange rate, Spitfire has the more pleasing poulet.

I think chef Curry uses a fair hand on the garlic press, but Bill, on the night we dined, argued that the wine-and-leek broth used to steam his bowl of mussels needed a lot more of that pungent bulb. Still, he sopped up every bit of the broth with crusty bread. He enjoyed even more bread in Curry's version of an Italian panzanella salad — with the heretical additions of avocado and mint — topped with a gorgeous piece of grilled pink salmon. "It's beautiful and delicious," he raved.

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