Watts Grocery delivers high-class, low-frills option

What makes a great neighborhood restaurant?

Hearty cooking, fair prices, pleasant servers? These are givens. An eclectic beverage list, late-night hours and attractive trappings? These are added perks. Watts Grocery capitalizes on all fronts and, thus, has quickly become a favorite local eating and drinking destination.

Watts Grocery opened earlier this fall under the watchful eye of Durham native and campus mainstay Amy Tornquist. Tornquist oversaw the Nasher Museum Cafe from its inception in 2005 until this summer, and her Sage & Swift catering operation provides nourishment to faculty and students alike at Upstairs at The Commons. Tornquist's ties to the local community are evident in this latest venture and serve to create a restaurant that is distinctively Durham.

Whereas the area's other newer restaurants unabashedly turn to Europe or Asia for culinary direction, Watts Grocery serves fervently North Carolinian cuisine. This is not just fried chicken, however, as Tornquist builds seasonal menus that are both robust and light.

What makes Watts Grocery particularly attractive to Duke students is its proximity to East Campus. Add to this brunch, lunch, dinner and late-night menus and you have a restaurant that can dependably put out an enjoyable meal at nearly any time of the day. At brunch, Tornquist offers shrimp and grits, popular from her time at the Nasher Museum Cafe. The lunch menu holds a bowl of macaroni and cheese laced with sautéed mushrooms. The sweetbread sandwich, easily one of the most decadent sandwiches in the entire area, is also woefully confined to the same lunch menu and is worth skipping class for.

The dinner menu presents more ambitious offerings like a distinctive quail dish with bite-sized goat cheese dumplings. Meatier fare includes a ribeye steak-made from local beef-and a pork porterhouse. Tornquist's devotion to local produce and farms is evident in much of the restaurant's cuisine-the pork chop and quail were particularly noteworthy for their unadulterated meaty appeal on recent visits.

Even after most restaurants have closed, Watts Grocery continues putting out notable food well into the night. Diners who stop by after 10:30 p.m. can select from a limited menu that includes the area's best hushpuppies, fried smelts and chicken gizzards. All three items come from the deep fryer, and all three are unanimously delicious. The hushpuppies are fried to a deep golden brown, yet remain light in texture thanks to the addition of fresh herbs to the cornmeal mixture. The gizzards are lightly-battered nuggets of slightly-chewy, chicken-y goodness. The wine and beer list is of moderate length but well-selected, and many wine offerings are available by the glass and mini-carafe, allowing for a good deal of flexibility.

The restaurant's only shortcomings lie in the fact that the staff sometimes cannot consistently maintain the level of execution and service that one might expect in more serious restaurants. The bread of a pastrami sandwich was not sufficiently toasted, rendering the sandwich soggy and cumbersome to eat. Similarly, plating can appear slightly haphazard at times. The service staff, despite their generally laudable and sincere efforts, sometimes lack strong grasp of the menu's food, wine and cocktail offerings.