A Seat At The Table: Draft + Table: Argenta’s Next Great Restaurant

Pictured above: The stunning bar provides a centerpiece at Draft + Table. 

 

Situated on the corner of North Little Rock’s Broadway and Main streets, Draft + Table is the shared brainchild of co-owners Scott Landers, a local businessman and CEO of ATG USA, and Kevin Doroski, who serves as the restaurant’s executive chef. The recent addition to the thriving Argenta Arts District savors the classics and uplifts the old-school, making for a fresh but familiar experience of one’s favorite foods.

“Kevin was a chef down at Ristorante Capeo, [which has] open kitchen seating,” Landers said. “My wife and I would often sit at the bar and have a drink and a meal down there, and we got to know Kevin really well over the years of talking through the window. It got to the point where Kevin would come over on Sundays, and we’d cook together.

“There might have been a bottle of wine or two involved one night over a dish of duck cacciatore we were cooking when the idea came that, hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?”

 

The most basic foundation of what the duo wanted to create was simple: a welcoming environment with really good food.

 

“We want to treat everybody that walks through that door like family, and we don’t want to serve them anything we wouldn’t serve to our own mothers,” Landers said.

 

Rather than making a regionally based menu around, for example, Italian or Greek food, they settled on the melting pot of traditional American cuisine, keeping the food approachable and familiar.

 

“We really wanted to pay tribute to the classics,” Doroski said. “There’s a reason why these dishes have been around for so long and we wanted to showcase why.”

The space Draft + Table now occupies was formerly the well-known bar Cregeen’s Irish Pub. While the great bones of the location offered many benefits, such as virtually irreplaceable mahogany woodwork and the 78-foot-long bar, the structure also presented serious and unexpected challenges when it came to remodeling.

 

“We came on a Sunday afternoon and took a look through the restaurant,” Landers said. “We knew right away that the kitchen was going to be a 100-percent replacement. There was no salvageable equipment in the process, and that applied to the restrooms, as well. We started the remodeling process thinking that was our big focus and immediately ran into some interesting problems. The kitchen had been built with no prep sink. There was a lack of under-slab plumbing behind the bar, so all of the beer taps drained across the floor to a floor drain.”

 

Jackhammering the concrete floors to install the necessary plumbing for the kitchen and bar caused a month-and-a-half delay. Perhaps the most painful delay came only three weeks before the renovation was supposed to be completed. The space had concrete floors, which were expected to clean up easily, but the owners discovered after cleaning that there were yellowish bleach stains all across the floor that necessitated additional grinding, polishing and staining.

Thanks to the help of a solid team, including Krebs Brothers Restaurant Supply in North Little Rock and Shine Interior Design Studio in Lonoke, the duo was eventually able to overcome all obstacles. The end result is a fusion of wood and modern finishes that feels classy and clean without being too nice to touch or get dirty, making the atmosphere as approachable as the menu.

 

Draft + Table officially opened Nov. 22. It was something of an odd time to open, coming just after the last major music event of the year at nearby Simmons Bank Arena.

 

“Opening the week of Thanksgiving was something we just fell into,” Doroski said. “We were just ready to be open, and that’s how the timing worked. I loved how it worked out, because instead of opening the floodgates and getting rushed, we kind of got to stair-step into it on that holiday week. Everybody still had family in town, so we got people who were bringing them out, but we also didn’t get hit all at once.”

 

That allowed for a significant amount of breathing room that Doroski and his team put to excellent use. Each night after closing that first week, they sat down together and discussed the problems they had encountered that day, propose possible solutions, and hear suggestions from team members. With each passing day, the owners’ confidence and level of preparedness increased exponentially.

 

“I don’t think anything can bring people closer together than food and music,” Doroski said. “We’ve got the food aspect, and then we also put on some pretty good jams around here. That’s always been the way to get people to gather and have a bit of revelry.”

 

Open for lunch and dinner on weekdays, in addition to brunch on Saturday and Sunday, plus Saturday dinner, Draft + Table’s menu includes options fit for a quick bite to eat, such as the restaurant’s tour of America’s greatest sandwiches, from Reuben to shrimp po-boy. Patrons can also savor an hour-long meal enjoyed with a bottle of wine, such as a 14-ounce New York strip.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about [the menu] and put myself into it. It’s really just a collection of experiences I’ve had across my life,” Doroski said. “When I was growing up in Russellville, we ate a lot of rabbit, so I knew what we could do with it and what the potential was there. Putting that on there was a bit of a risk, but it’s paying off. Everybody seems to like it.

 

“Hanging out with a bunch of the redneck duck hunters that I grew up with, they always had one way of cooking duck, so I thought, ‘There’s got to be some more techniques out there that we can fuse with this to make it work.’”

 

Another of Doroski’s personal favorite menu items is the walleye. The fish, native to the Great Lakes, can also be found in many Arkansas lakes and streams thanks to the stocking efforts of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. A favorite choice of northern visitors — including a surprisingly high number of Minnesotans — walleye has become the No. 1 seller among Arkansans.

 

“I’m afraid we’re going to put walleye on the endangered species list,” Doroski said. “We have it on the menu twice as the walleye sandwich, which is a huge hit, and the walleye entree on goat cheese couscous with grilled carrots.”

 

No doubt the most popular appetizer — to the point that Landers felt the need to express his sympathies to the kitchen staff who have to make so many — are the so-called “armadillo eggs” advertised on the menu as the winner of the Chef’s Choice Award at the Stumptown BBQ Smoke-Off in Whitefish, Mont. Doroski describes himself at that time as “just a kid with a Walmart smoker trying to impress a girl,” but with that one, he had a hit on his hands, and the dish has remained an evolving part of his repertoire.

 

Today, the “eggs” take the form of fresh grilled jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese and wrapped in sausage and cheese breading before being baked until golden and crispy and served with a blackberry cream sauce.

 

“A lot of the things that go into this are just things that are near and dear to my own heart. Things I’ve collected and memories from throughout the years that I really wanted to recreate and put out there to make people have the same feelings as when I first had that dish,” Doroski said.

 

“One of the things that Chef is a little bit humble about is that the only thing in this restaurant that doesn’t come from a whole food is our french fries,” Landers said. “Every single plate of food that comes out of here starts as a potato, a vegetable, a whole cut of meat. The process that he goes through to put this on the plates is phenomenal.”

 

The team at Draft + Table puts just as much passion into the drink menu as they put into the food — after all, the name gives equal weight to both. While the 50 taps that once lined Cregeen’s Dublin-made, 78-foot bar have been totally replaced, as much of the bar itself as possible was saved, making it as much a part of the restaurant as the meal that finds its way onto a guest’s table.

 

“We knew we wanted to stick with the classic cocktails and just bring some of those back,” Doroski said. “People’s go-tos, things that you don’t even need to see on a menu, you just know that it’s going to be there because you’re at a bar. We knew that we had to do right by those and make sure that we had those recipes down.”

 

The duo invested in four frozen drink machines to make the likes of frosés and peach bellinis, a decision that proved particularly fruitful now that such drinks have found great popularity with younger crowds.

 

“We were looking at what the industry was doing with craft beer and wine,” Landers said.  Wine is not the younger generation’s go-to for a beverage, and I really felt like we were going to be super beer-heavy. [Doroski] put together an amazing wine list. We worked on it. We refined it.

 

“The other evening, there was a young couple in here that travels internationally, and [the man] had an uncle who’s got a winery in Napa, [Calif.] He told me, ‘This might be the best wine list I’ve seen in central Arkansas. There’s not a lot of pretension on here, but there’s a lot of really good, solid wines.’ We’ve gotten a number of compliments about the wine list.”

 

Those compliments are reflected in the restaurant’s sales numbers. While beer, particularly craft beers, do make up a significant chunk, wine outsells beer two to one.

 

“The amount of Caymus and Austin Hope that we’re going through in this place is unreal,” Landers said.

 

The single most popular drink, however, is the espresso martini, for which every shot is freshly brewed using an authentic La Marzocco Italian espresso machine. Second place goes to the Gentleman’s Old Fashioned made, as the name suggests, with Gentleman Jack whiskey.

 

Draft + Table has only been open for a few short months, but the duo is proud of the support received from the North Little Rock community.

 

“I think Scott and I both have a sort of soft spot for Argenta,” Doroski said. “It’s a demographic that we really care about, and it’s a lot of people that we really want to impress and do right by.”

Landers added that Argenta has become known for its eateries.

 

“I’ve been married to my wife for 23 years, and for 21 of them we’ve been coming down to Argenta,” he said. “All kinds of credit to [brothers Brian and Eric Isaac] on opening Ristorante Capeo because that really was the first piece that made this a dinner destination. They were the pioneers.

 

“We moved down here during the [COVID-19] pandemic, and part of the reason we wanted to open this was because we wanted to make this nice for the neighborhood. The other restaurant owners are fantastic. We’ve been well received by them. I feel like the neighborhood has embraced us. The local community has been fantastic. The city, as well, they’ve been absolutely fantastic to work, with getting this opened up.”

 

This tight-knit business community is one in which Draft + Table is happy to have found its place, Doroski said.

 

“That feeling of community is another reason I just love being down here,” Doroski said. “They gather all of the business owners and talk about, for example, the upcoming Dogtown Throwdown. ‘Here’s what we have planned.’ That way, you find that people aren’t crossing each other. There isn’t a lot of competition down here. A high tide is going to raise all ships. When you get people down here, they’re going to stay down here.”

 

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