Thoughts on The Everly

The name of downtown Kingston’s newest restaurant – The Everly - brings to mind mid-century Hollywood Hills. Long hot switchbacks with the top down. Off-duty movie stars in white slacks and with bare arms. She has a big floppy hat, and he’s raking leaves across the surface of a cool blue pool. Iron gates trundle over tarmac hotter than the sun. 

There are bright birds too – macaws! you shriek -  and there is music, and I don’t see any good reason why it wouldn’t be the The Everly Brothers themselves: “Whenever I want you, all I have to do is drea-ea- ea-ea-eam, dream, dream, dream.” 

 A time, then, when the living was easy.

Opening a new restaurant, on the other hand, is no easy task and with that particular dream comes anxiety too: for the owners mostly, of course, but also for the hordes waiting for this grand experiment to kick off. What if they totally fuck it up? What if Jamie Hodges and Amber Thom can’t pull it off. What if this leap from the culinary cliff - from the pretty lakeside isolations of The Juniper Café to all the scrutiny that comes with setting up shop at the corner of Brock and Wellington – just makes a bit of a mess on the street?  It’s not rare, after all, to see these thick-walled old banks turned into garish night clubs and leaden, moneypunk gastropubs. Lasers get aimed recklessly into the sky. The door to the vault is left hanging inside like the punchline to an old joke. Michael Caine stops by for the launch in a bottlegreen suit and flogs a few T-shirts. 

They’ve made no such mistakes here. The Everly isn’t like any restaurant we’ve seen in Kingston, and I reckon it’s the best addition to the food scene since Northside opened up in the old Turk’s space just east of Clergy.

The food – and this won’t surprise you – is excellent. Well-plated and unfussy. Classical fare on a well-curated and not overlong menu that plays handsomely to their strengths. The local is emphasized over the exotic. Serious attention paid to detail and proper friendly service. The cubes of focaccia may stand a fraction taller, a little prouder, than they did at the Juniper, but that just enhances the impression of being greeted by an old friend all grown up.

I’ll return here regularly for the food, sure enough, but the room itself fascinates me every bit as much. Because it’s just not easy to warm these abandoned financial spaces. Banks plan always to gently intimidate depositors. To impress with high ceilings, but also to frighten with all the armoured glass and the cameras.

 At The Everly the big move was to install a mighty (and mighty pretty) chandelier almost dead centre. It suggests immediately that your presence is being celebrated rather than simply tolerated. The concrete floors have been finished to resemble marble. The ceilings are a midnight blue and the sensation when night falls outside is of a glamorous sort of camping, a communion under a big starlit canopy.

The main seating (and lovely seating it is – leaning heavily on blue velvet benches) is arranged around the perimeter in a way that, to my eye, democratizes things. You’re not going to walk in one evening and see the mayor on a spotlit pedestal with his attendants, or some hotshot property developer, or real estate agent, or plastic surgeon, holding entitled court behind a bejewelled railing.

There is a coat check down a few stairs. Or at least a generous rack where the host will deposit your (faux) fur. The open kitchen further down, in a basement that seems both oddly glamorous in how it reminds me of London England set-ups, particularly that at Nopi, one of Yotam Ottolenghi’s glammy storefronts, and also slightly curious in how it’s right next to the bathrooms. 

The lounge and bar are tucked at the back of the room. Row upon row of perfectly arranged and perfectly spotless glassware glitter nearly to the ceiling. There must be a ladder stashed away somewhere for retrieving those. But I like the way they each catch the light from the chandelier and split it into a million stars. 

There’s something very old-time glamorous about all this. It’s as if you’ve landed at some red-carpet hotel, a thousand staterooms stacked above you. And peering deep into that sociable crowd last week, past the swirling tumblers of stirred gin and squat sleeves of darkest stout, I could have sworn for half a second that I’d spied Lauren Bacall holding court back there, raving for damn good reason about the trout.