What with all the new restaurants opening up around here lately (seriously, downtown seems like it’s infested with ’em), I didn’t notice that the Decoy Bar and Grill had opened; it’s the new restaurant on the corner of Bond and Greenwood. It was this article in the Source today that caught my attention… the place actually sounds pretty good, especially the food.

The menu is a nice mix of the expected and unexpected, retaining a few offerings of the well-worn “pub food” genre. There are crispy wings, but there is also pastrami and yellowfin tuna on crostini (a strange but very tasty pairing). There is a burger. (One of the best I’ve had in town.) But there’s also a corned beef Reuben that is so gargantuan that making a colossal mess is deliciously inevitable.

The entrées range from chicken served with plum sauce and couscous, to crab cakes served with remoulade, to a grilled thick-cut pork chop. There is definitely a Southern streak in some of the dishes like the white bean soup with bacon and wilted kale, and the jerk chicken tender sandwich. I sampled the baked grits and shrimp, a relatively simple dish that seems to stump anyone above the Mason Dixon line. Not so at the Decoy, the grits were creamy, the shrimp grilled and spiced to perfection and the caramelized onions and bell peppers added nice body to the dish.

Their website needs work, though. The menus aren’t online yet, and that’s the main thing for a restaurant website to have (in my opinion). The other interesting thing is the website says the Decoy is closed Sundays, while the Source article says they’re open seven days a week. Call first if it’s a Sunday.

If/when we get a chance to try it, I’ll post my own review.