Crown Bar feels a lot like Gary’s Steak Out & Bar. I always felt older, a little more grown up, in Gary’s, which closed in July. It wasn’t just about paying $30 for slabs of mesquite-kissed beef that put me on my best behavior. It was in what Crown Bar proprietor Charlie McManus calls the restaurant’s “bones” – the rich wood-lined walls and back bar that gave the steakhouse an aura of a nonsmoking men’s club.

McManus, chef-owner of Sixth Avenue’s Primo Grill, bought Gary’s building in July. In September, after a spot of paint and better lighting, McManus opened Crown Bar.

Crown Bar is a comfortable neighborhood bar – not the place where you do shots of Jagermeister, but the kind of place where you meet up for a bite and a drink, at the bar or at a big, comfortable table near the fireplace.

Crown Bar’s twist on bar food is “street food” – things you might purchase and eat while strolling foreign sidewalks: bratwurst with curry ketchup or an earthy mushroom quesadilla ($8 each).

Kebabs ($8-$9) hold the middle ground between finger foods and small entrees. Tender beef kebabs carried the herby-garlicky allure of North Africa, while the cool, creamy bite of yogurt and cucumber pegged chicken tikka kebabs on the Indian subcontinent.

Entrees are home cooking, in style and sourcing. Buttermilk fried chicken ($18, really juicy and a touch greasy, or “jeasy” as I said after my first bite) is grown by Thurston County organic farmer Jerry Stokesberry. Grass-fed ground beef (in a $13 burger that lacked the flavor of fat) hails from Thundering Hooves of Walla Walla. That sharp and creamy bite in toasty-topped mac and cheese ($12) comes from Cougar Gold cheddar.

Be prepared for grown-up prices on many entrees – up to $24 for surf and turf dishes.

Desserts come from Primo Grill. I hope they don’t run out of coconut rice pudding before I return to Crown Bar. This stuff was amazingly creamy, tender and coconutty. And I don’t like coconut.

Hours: 5 p.m.-midnight Sundays and Tuesdays-Thursdays; 5 p.m.-1 a.m. Fridays-Saturdays.

INDOCHINE ON PEARL 4612 N. PEARL ST., TACOMA; 253-761-2727

This is the fourth restaurant from the Ngov family, which opened Indochine Seafood and Satay Bar in Federal Way in 1995. A dressed-down version, Indochine Café, opened in Fircrest in 2005, followed by Indochine Asian Dining Lounge, the strikingly chic eatery with a waterfall in downtown Tacoma.

Indochine on Pearl opened a month ago, as the name suggests, on Pearl Street, in a part of north Tacoma lacking in restaurants.

Indochine on Pearl inhabits the former Sar’s Oriental Cuisine. I never dined at Sar’s, so I’ll have to rely on the comments of two people from the neighborhood who did. I overheard them talking about the humble restaurant’s transformation. Both of them said, “Wow.”

I’ll assume those comments were directed at the décor, particularly the twin walls of water that greet diners at the front door, or the swags of drapes that lend the 50-something-seat dining room a chic intimacy and block the views of the asphalt parking lot that surrounds the restaurant.

The menu will be familiar to Indochine’s fans – from homey curries to spry salads. In my first-bite visits, I tasted some old favorites. Sesame wraps ($12.95) were delicious; I like the combination of mango, chili, nuts and basil folded in buttery flatbread. But the white meat chicken in my order was dry and chewy. So were strips of beef in an otherwise top-notch salad ($10.95). The jumbo thighs in the honey chicken satay ($9.95) had charry-sweet flavor, but their size and sinew suggested that the meat wasn’t from a spring chicken.

Hours: 4-9 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays.

HUONG VIET 6643 SOUTH TACOMA WAY, TACOMA; 253-475-2228

Everyone knows pho: steaming bowls of beef broth and vermicelli noodles with thin slices of beef (or chicken or tofu or meatballs). Huong Viet, which opened a month ago in a warm and comfortable 50-seat location across from Harkness Furniture, kicks up pho with regional variations – throwing in flat Cambodian rice noodles, udon wheat noodles, egg noodles, crispy duck, quail eggs and such ($6 each bowl).

In a first bite, two dishes stood out: rolled grape leaves stuffed with minced beef ($3.95 appetizer, $6.25 entrée) were deep fried just until the leaves crisped. A hindquarter of chicken was crisp, juicy and eye-popping served atop pink-hued rice cooked in tomato broth.

Salads, noodle dishes and meat entrees are $6-$8.95. Drinks include two of my favorite acquired tastes: salted plum and lemon sodas, which taste as they sound.

Hours: 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Sundays-Thursdays, 10 a.m.-10 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays.

Ed Murrieta: 253-597-8678

ed.murrieta@thenewstribune.com