Jim Brady’s

We’ve started ducking out early on Fridays. After years of not being able to do that, we’re making up for it one afternoon at a time — out in Royal Oak while everyone else is still at their desks. This is exactly the kind of place the habit is for.

We’d driven past Jim Brady’s plenty of times. From South Main it reads as a restaurant with a parking lot. Inside is something else entirely. Mike’s verdict, delivered somewhere around the second drink: he’s been to steakhouses in Chicago that spent enormous money trying to feel like this and never got there, because the money runs out before the room becomes real. Seventy years of one family running restaurants in this town will do what a budget can’t.

We came for happy hour and stayed for dinner. Shared the ahi tuna to start, then Mike had the steak frites and Andrea the halibut Rockefeller. Honest scorecard: the steak frites was spot on, the halibut came out heavily salted. Next time we’re staying on the turf side of the menu.

The happy hour is the headline anyway — $7 craft cocktails, $5 drafts, half off appetizers and glasses of wine, Monday through Friday, three to six. On our way out we finally clocked the roll-up doors along half the dining room and the small patio out back, which is obviously the best seating in the building on a good-weather day. Filed away for next time. We were happy where we sat regardless.