Doug Quinn's old-world culinary saloon — the best bar food in Westport, a pedigree that goes back to P.J. Clarke's Manhattan, and a room where deals feel natural.
Doug Quinn spent two decades behind the bar at P.J. Clarke's on Third Avenue in Manhattan — one of New York's most famous saloons and a room that has hosted more deals, dates, and departures than most restaurants manage in a century. When Quinn brought his version of that institution to Westport's Main Street in 2021, he brought with him the understanding that a great bar is a social machine, and that the food, the service, and the atmosphere all serve a single purpose: to make the people in the room comfortable enough to be themselves.
The menu is American comfort food executed with the skill of a kitchen that takes the genre seriously. The 3rd Avenue El burger — award-winning, properly built, served with the conviction of a kitchen that believes a burger is worth caring about — anchors the menu. The raw bar provides the seafood component that Westport's location on Long Island Sound demands. Slow pan-roasted north Atlantic cod represents the more ambitious end of the kitchen's range. Classic cocktails, mixed with the precision of someone who learned at the source, are the proper accompaniment to all of it.
For closing a deal in Westport, Hudson Malone offers the correct register: serious enough to be a statement, casual enough to be comfortable, and run by someone who understands that the function of a great bar is to make the conversation go well. The old-world saloon aesthetic — dark wood, proper lighting, a bar that anchors the room — provides the backdrop that business conversations benefit from when they need to feel like something other than business.