Eat Local Memphis: Bari, Brad Pitts, and Battleship | Restaurants

Here’s the deal. When enough people rave about things, you should probably start listening. Raise your hand if you’ve heard this before:

Brad Pitts is the best bartender in Memphis and the bar at Bari is awesome.
-Almost everybody

If you haven’t heard that, then you haven’t been listening. And if you haven’t seen that, then you haven’t been reading the Memphis Flyer’s Best Of issue each year. Well, I took my own advice for a change and hit up the bar at Bari with K the other night before we went out to a movie (more on that later). Brad got us settled in with a couple of frosty beverages, and we started to look over the menu. Fortunately for me, a good friend of mine. and a Bari regular, was sitting next to me to give me advice. 

Side note – No wonder I have such a hard time cooking at home, I really just want other people to tell me what to eat. – End side note.

Fortunately the Salvation Army soldier was full of good info, and K and I remembered enough of her brother’s recommendations to be dangerous!

The mussels at Bari have come highly recommended to me by many people. It is not often that people say “they might be as good as Tsunami’s” about anything, let alone the mussels, but that’s what they say. What I’m saying is that there is now room in my heart for another mussels dish. Totally different and totally awesome. It is doubtful that I’ll ever start a meal at Bari without these. Just sayin’.

Next up was the oriecchiette, which looked good enough on the menu for me to embarrass myself by mangling the pronunciation when I tried to order it. It came with some rapini, tomatoes, anchiovies, and garlic. This was really delicious. The tomatoes and the rapini were perfect and the rest just punched up the flavor.