Bar Review: Wilfie & Nell

The Short of it...
This is a great place to go with some friends for some bar food and beer. Early arrivals mean quiet space, as the night drags on it fills and gets too loud to have a conversation below a soft shout. The food is hit or miss, but when its a hit it's great. The decor is that contrived gastro-pub/urban farmhouse oasis that one can't seem to get away from, but it's a good little spot.

EAT: Amazing sliders, great grilled cheese, good fries, good salad.

DRINK: Great beers, good wine, whiskey tea, and they will make spiked Arnold Palmers (hooray!)

AVOID: Anything with sausage, I mean it.

Some interior decorator took 3 weeks planning the "haphazard" box pile.

And the Long...

The owner of this place is buddies with Joaquin Baca (the guy behind Momofuku and Rusty Knot), who put the menu together. So I was not surprised to see written on the menu "Wilfie & Nell prides itself on sourcing foods from the following local purveyors (ostentatious for nearby suppliers): Bread: Blue Ribbon Bakery. Cheese: Murray’s Cheese Shop Chutneys and preserves: Beth's Farm Kitchen. Meat: Piccinini Brothers. Pickles: Bob McClure".

Wood slats, mismatched tables, mason jars, you get the idea.

These are good places to be buying stuff from, so we can overlook the culinary equivalent of name dropping at a party and get down to brass tacks. The menu looks like the kiddies at top chef were told to make pub food. The roots are there, and there is special attention paid to the ingredients. Farmhouse cheddar, gruyere (these are my favorite cheeses) and tallegio (its good too). You can have your choice in their excellent grilled cheese. These are thick, buttery, crisp, gooey bombs of cheezy goodness. I recommend any, but I especially like the ham and cheddar. These guys do know how to get a crisp buttery surface on a slice of toast, that's for sure.

Great bread and cheese, skip the corned beef.

Oddly enough, the Corned Beef and Gruyere was a huge fail. The gruyere simply overpowered it (or the corned beef is underwhelming), so instead of any flavor from the meat all you get is salt. This makes the cheese even more robust, but too salty, and just doesn't quite do it. If you're gonna intake that much cheese, meat and butter it had better be worth every single calorie.


The salad is delicious, and the fries are great. The real super star(s) here though is (are) the Berkshire Pork sliders. The meat is perfect, the pickles a little spicy, and the cut surface of the brioche bun has been subjected to that same heavenly treatment as the grilled cheese; the insides of the bun have an amazingly satisfying buttery crisp bite that offsets the soft texture of the pork.

These are good, really, really good.

On a high from the pork sliders (or perhaps all that Smithwick's Ale...) I thought it prudent to sample the pigs in blankets. These little pork sausages are not wrapped in your run of the mill pastry dough my friends, they are wrapped in BACON.

Wait, do I smell bacon?!?!

Sadly, I did not plunge to uncharted depths of deliciousness, discovering a new, delectable, diet-damming dish. I am of the opinion that bacon is one of the most perfect foods ever, so these little things are a travesty. The sausage is like a stick of greasy chewy salt, wrapped in a piece of bacon so overly cooked that it tastes like charcoal; the cook should be scolded.

You may need to avert your eyes.

They look like cat poop, and they are so greasy they actually stained the granite bar through the wax paper and the basket they came in. The poor HP sauce they come with, that has been bravely masking horrible English pub food for centuries, tries in vain to overcome these little burnt salt licks from hell. Looking at my neighbors Scotch Egg and its charred beyond taste sausage shell, I abstained from ordering one. Anything with sausage is a no no at Wilfie and Nell's.

This bar is a good place to be.

The only drink worth mentioning is the whiskey tea. The others are Kool-Aid with booze (the bramble especially) or glorified gin and tonics. Great beers, good wines.

Wilfie and Nell: 2/5 bacon strips

This concludes Gastroliaison's review of Wilfie and Nell.