AY About You June 2021

Midtown Billiards has been called many things in its mind-bending 81-year history — a dive, a joint, a tavern, an all-nighter and a few compliments not for print word-for-word. But mostly, it’s been Little Rock’s favorite late-night address, a fixture in the South Main neighborhood that time, tastes and even a 2016 grease fire could not silence.

You might not know to look at it — and owner David Shipp recoils at the term — but the maverick spot is a drinking and dining institution, a trailblazer more than trendsetter, putting as much attention into food as drink, even at 4 o’clock in the morning.

“As for being considered a ‘pioneer,’ I would just say, it’s something you can’t get too wrapped up into,” Shipp says. “An ego is something that kills you in any business; once you start to feel like you’re so big that the world needs to listen to what you have to say for reasons X, Y and Z, that’s ego. It comes in and starts to tear you down, starts to make you a person who loses touch with what’s happening in the world.

“When people say, ‘We were told you have the best burger in town,’ I’ll tell them, ‘Well, yes, we have a very good burger here.’ I shy away from saying we have ‘the best,’ because that’s subjective, and it’s kind of hard to build up something and then hope that their expectations will meet what the PR has been built up about it. So, I try to stay humble, and I try to stay in the now, and I try to stay real.”

That said, Midtown Billiards makes one of, if not the best burger in town. And not just because it is always fresh, or always inventive (you like SPAM on yours, you just don’t know it until you come here). It’s because the burger or the brats or any of the other great pub fare and the bar are one and the same — inseparable and more than the sum of their parts. All the best bar food is.

“Well, there’s no point in reinventing the wheel,” Shipp says, citing the Gospel of Maggie Hinson, his mother, who bought the place in the 1990s. “There’s no reason to overthink the process. Like most establishments that have good food, it always starts with fresh ingredients that are prepped fresh daily. We don’t import anything that’s frozen. We just try to stay as consistent with it as possible, keeping it as simple as we can.”

Anyone who knows will tell you Midtown Billiards is one of the most influential spots anywhere in the Little Rock bar scene for serving excellent food to patrons on the principle of the thing. As, still, one of the few all-night joints in the city, its sober-up staples would be consumed regardless of quality in many cases. But Hinson regarded her motley patrons — be they ending a night of unhinged revelry or quietly clocking out of third shift — as family, so no deepfried mess was good enough.

“Clientele always shapes what you’re going to offer,” Shipp says. “And we do offer food and services to a lot of people who are getting off that late shift. We have a lot of burgers with egg or bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches or SPAM, egg and cheese — anything with an egg on it is going to do well. Sometimes we just sell egg sandwiches, and I think that is something that’s a good addition to the menu — it’s simple, it’s easy and it satisfies. People really enjoy a good egg on their sandwiches.”

Blessedly, there are many other bars now that follow this same principle of knowing one’s customer and cooking for them. Few stay open until 5 a.m., and fewer still have the miles on them Midtown does, but all are driven by a doneright ethos, bringing dish, people and environment into balance.

A come-lately disciple of this formula is North Bar in the Park Hill neighborhood in North Little Rock, a bright space that blurs the line between watering hole and gourmet diner.

“We see ourselves as a bar that serves really good food,” says Snee Dismang, who owns the place with her husband, Kyle. “When we opened, Park Hill hadn’t had liquor in 50 years. So, we knew we wanted to do a bar there, but the main focus would be the burgers.”

That alone might not have necessarily set North Bar into the class of destination dining, but other dishes — things like the fried Brussels sprouts appetizer, salad topped with salmon filet or a sweet and sour chicken sandwich — certainly do.

“Plenty of people are pleasantly surprised by our food. I think that’s what put us on the map,” Dismang says. “I think seasoning is big; I’m Indian, so seasoning is a huge thing for us.”

The bar’s bestseller of late is the fried pickle burger, but the range of North Bar’s kitchen offers a little something for everyone.