Counter Intelligence: A little crunch with your Chianti at Tar & Roses

Wine is important at Andrew Kirschner's new restaurant, but so is the food, starting with the lardon- and chile-laced popcorn appetizer. From there, it's a serious but playful mix of wood-fired small-plate temptations.

Any discussion of Tar & Roses must begin, as your dinner probably will, with what is probably its simplest appetizer, a concoction of popcorn tossed with brown sugar, lardons and chile, like a bowl of Cracker Jack with chewy cubes of bacon instead of peanuts. (Why can't there be chewy cubes of bacon and peanuts? That is an excellent question.) The popcorn falls solidly into a genre new in Los Angeles cooking, something we may call an elevated bar snack, a staple of the many, many gastropubs that have come to dominate casual dining here over the last couple of years.

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