The Ale House’s new site is a cavernous space with a rosewood bar, exposed brick walls, and a high stamped-tin ceiling with mezzanine seating just below it. The space used to be the Roost, an occasional jazz club, and after that, briefly, the Powow River Grille.
Three of the six people who keep the Ale House running, according to its website, are CIA graduates - as in Culinary Institute of America, not the spy agency. The fried pickles are just one indication that these folks aren’t afraid to do things a little differently.
For educational purposes, we ended up ordering three different deep-fried appetizers. Our favorite was the pickles, which were very hot and no weirder, really, than tempura squash. The shaved onion rings with bourbon horseradish ketchup were crisp and shoelace-thin ($6.50). Ancho-dusted Belgian frites with lime ($5.50) turned out not be anchovy-flavored french fries, to the disappointment of one of our party of four, but it was probably just as well. (Ancho is a dried chili pepper, although we couldn’t really detect it.)
Another off-the-beaten-track app was called Great Hill Bleu, a tasty plate of mild local blue cheese with crackers and chewy bits of fig ($3.25). Rounding out our starters was a pair of draft beers that were new to us: a Dogfish Head IPA ($5) and a Kulmbacher EKU pilsner ($6). One of our group, an occasional home brewer, followed these up with a “well-hopped’’ Oppigards lager from Sweden ($9), mainly because he could.
In fact, just reading the beer menu at the Ale House is part of an evening’s entertainment. The bar keeps two dozen brews on tap, and the selection changes weekly. The extensive beer list specifies the alcohol content of each offering. One $13 bottle of Canadian beer, at 9.5 percent, is called Dieu Du Ciel Rigor Mortis. We passed.
