Chain reaction: A ‘wine dive’ and a steakhouse

94 Perimeter Center West, Dunwoody. 770-730-8447, thecapitalgrille.com. $$$-$$$$

Max’s Wine Dive

I’m on Team Wine. I have this argument regularly with my beer-loving wife and occasionally with my colleague Bob Townsend, who writes this newspaper’s beer column among his many other duties. Despite their persuasive protestations that a $4 pint of saison can blow a $35 bottle of pinot noir out of the water with a food pairing, I stand firm. I am hardwired to prefer wine with my food, and I think a lot of other people would discover they are as well, if they exposed their palates to better, food-friendlier bottles.

So I’m all for the concept behind Max’s Wine Dive — a small Texas-based chain that has recently set up a beachhead in Midtown. The loud rock music, the walls covered with framed celebrity mug shots, the open kitchen, the cheery T-shirted waitstaff — it’s all a ploy to get millennials onto Team Wine. Good for them. In an era when cocktails and craft breweries get all the attention, we need every recruit we can attract. Wine needn’t go the way of, say, jazz.

The wine list here isn’t deep like the one at Bone’s or conversant in current trends like the one up the street at Lusca. But it’s appropriate to its mission, and offers a variety of Old and New World bottles and stylistic types to explore. If you can guarantee that your table will order two glasses of any bottle on the list, they’ll crack it open and charge you a by-the-glass price.

The kitchen tries hard to break with the perceived preciousness of wine bars and cook up some recognizable grub. Some of those T-shirts read, “Fried chicken and champagne? Why the hell not?!” Us oldsters who discovered this particularly felicitous pairing during the Clinton administration may laugh at the obvious, but a new generation needs to be told it’s OK to eat the simple food you crave with good wine.

Yet, here’s where things falter at Max’s. The kitchen is breathtakingly slow, and what you get for your wait can be, well, precious. A “preservation plate” of house-cured pickles set in splatter-art formation on a canvas-sized square plate. Popcorn caramelized with bacon bits spills out of a movie-style popcorn bag. But it’s soft and stale, something that cements your teeth shut rather than crunches between them. A grilled cheese sandwich redefines “greasy.”

I did like what the kitchen calls “pan borracho” — a puffy and savory bread pudding with gruyere cheese rather than the red chile-soaked “drunken bread” you might expect in a Mexican restaurant. And the fried chicken, thickly jacketed in breading and set up on a pedestal of mashed potatoes, is fine. It did, indeed, pair nicely with our Schramsberg Blanc de Noirs.

If the food could come faster and live up to its low-key promise, then I’d put Max’s on my Midtown go-to list. It made me very happy to see the seven-top next to us, no one over 30, and nearly all of them eating truffled mac and cheese with glasses of dark, ruby-red wine. If the wine’s earthiness finds a canny reflection in the funky esters of the truffle oil and its tannins rub appealingly against the sauce’s cheesy fat, then we’ve got a great pairing and a new member on Team Wine.

The Capital Grille — Dunwoody

Chains. Big, honking chains. Dining writers despair at the mention of these restaurants, never quite sure how to handle the reality that our readers eat frequently in chains and do debate their merits.

Some writers (who aren’t named Marilyn Hagerty) pen the intentionally funny, “Look at me, I’m at Olive Garden” story. Others duly note their existence and relegate any coverage to roundups of, say, places near the mall where you shop for Christmas. A very few chains, such as the recently opened Shake Shack, escape the reflexive opprobrium because they bring something fresh and longed-for to town.

I personally try to review chains on a case-by-case basis. For instance, the folks at Olive Garden would very much like me to write something about their new menu items, which include chicken wings with gorgonzola dipping sauce. But I eventually decided against visiting the restaurant because I would probably spend the whole column musing on this company’s wager that their customers prefer Buffalo to Tuscany. Nothing worse than a snotty restaurant critic in a chain.

I visited the Capital Grille in Dunwoody without any goal other than a clean steak dinner made with top ingredients. I figured that if this restaurant could deliver the goods, it was worthy of attention.

There are things I want to like about this restaurant, which macerates its own in-house pineapple martini (the “Stoli-Doli”) and dry-ages its steaks.

And there are things I do like. That martini might make a craft mixologist hang himself from his armband, but it tastes of fresh, sweet fruit, neutral spirits and nothing else. Chalk one up for simplicity.

The platter of fried calamari tossed with what appears to be a 16-ounce jar of pickled cherry peppers is very much what you want to eat with that martini.

But that $44 strip steak was a sore disappointment. Not only did it lack the flavors that should develop with dry aging, it was a thin, unevenly cooked thing. Ordered medium rare, it arrived closer to medium with an inch-thick border of gray on the perimeter. It was also chewy enough that I had to give up on a mouthful and dispose of it not in the way intended.

Yes, I could have sent it back, but we were sitting on the patio, and by the time a manager came to check on our table we had given up and made a meal of the crunchy French beans. The uneaten steak was cleared away without a question.

Service was otherwise incredibly friendly. The bill was high. And my advice to you would be to maybe try another chain.