Blue Rooster Has Soul in its Food, Music

The Blue Rooster is more than a blues bar with some food—it's a refined version of Americana.

The southern comfort food restaurant opened Jan. 5 and is continuing to make tweaks and improvements to its menu of food and music along the way to put down roots north of Fruitville Road at 1525 Fourth St.

Co-owner Bill Cornelius handles the music, and thank goodness he didn't follow through on opening up an ice cream shop because it might not have led to the Blue Rooster. 

"I always wanted to open a blues bar, but my wife wouldn't let me open one unless I had a partner," Cornelius said. So with the misses' permission, he found his business partner in a neighbor—Devon Rutkowski.

The bands that Cornelius and his staff round up focus heavily on original music, and if they're doing cover songs, there has to be a hook to them to make them original. For instance, Tony Tyler from Comeback Alice will come in to play cover songs, Cornelius explained, but there's a spin on it that he gives them that makes the songs more special.

On Easter weekend, Blue Rooster was hopping and packed three-deep at the bar with Big Al and the Heavyweights—a New Orleans band making a pit stop on a Friday night to play here in Sarasota before being featured in Universal Studios Orlando's Mardis Gras the following night. Then on Saturday, Radio-Free Carmela & The Transmitters filled the bar, getting folks to tap their feet, and even a couple managing to dance between the tables.

The idea of a blues bar evolved more into an Americana bar, bringing in a wider variety of musicians from someone like BIg Al to Radio-Free. Cornelius made sure he put attention into having a premium sound system and set-up to make it both easy for bands and pleasing on the ears for the crowd. The 24-foot tall ceiling is foam insulated to help reduce reverberation, and old barn wood planks have holes in them along with end cut pieces of wood placed along the walls to help absorb sound, Cornelius pointed out.

The word's out that this is a great venue to play, and Cornelius is trying to give preference to Sarasota-area bands first.

"Going forward next year, I'm trying to concentrate more on local bands and less on the out-of-town bands unless it's a really good band or nationally known act," Cornelius said, adding that booking agents routinely call from across the country to get their bands to play at the Blue Rooster.

One of those national acts is Paul Thorn, a Mississippi-based blues/rock singer who will perform at the Blue Rooster on April 25.

"It's almost like a private party. We're going to sell 125 tickets, have dinner from 6 to 8 p.m. and the band will put on a show starting at 8 p.m.," Cornelius said. (Tickets are $45 and are available to purchase at the restaurant.)

The restaurant seats 120 people, but hey, not everybody wants to sit down while listening to music, right? What about clearing out the seating in front of the stage so people can get up and groove?

"We're having Thomas Wind from the Believers on April 20, and we're thinking about doing that—clearing out the center tables up close to the stage because younger people like to stand up and hang out, get close and dance," Cornelius said.

The Blue Rooster also provides plenty of information on the bands and who's playing on its website—BlueRoosterSRQ.com, and has its own Reverb Nation page linked from its music page so you can listen to the bands before you come out to see them that night.

So with all that dancing and toe-tapping, you'll need food and some southern booze to fuel the night.

Mosey on over the the bar for a solid list of whisky and bourbon drinks. There's the Bourbon Waffle with Maple Flavored Crown Royal, with fresh lemon that might tease your tastebuds for that chicken and waffles craving. The Sazerac with Old Forester Bourbon is a good standby you don't hear about anymore, but if you want that feeling of sitting out on the porch in the summer, listening to the slide guitar, ask for the Bayou Backwater, which includes Southern Comfort, Peach Schnapps and lemon. It's the perfect, cold, stiff drink that has a refreshing quality to it.

If you're more of a beer guy, the bar has a good selection of craft beers, including UFO White, Dogfish Head 60 Min IPA, and  in bottle form has St. Pete Orange Wheat, and yes, you can even get a PBR or Schlitz.

OK, so you want to eat, right? Chef Mike Yoder's focus is on southern comfort foods, aiming toward mainly the Carolinas, Tennessee and Kentucky. There is some Deep South mixed in there, too.

"Mainly home food, hearty stuff you serve to family, friends and neighbors," Yoder said.

One of his special twists he takes is on the mac and cheese. 

"We don't use elbow pasta, we use ditalini pasta. Instead of the elbow pasta, imagine the curve being cut into three pieces," he said, and it still provides a good shape for all the cheese to cram inside.

"We use sharp white, yellow and smoked gouda, and also top that with a crouton consisting of Ritz crackers, clarified butter, fresh herbs and a small amount of panko," he said, and a with another finishing on top, he gives a crunchy, as well as gooey texture.

Let's face it—it's the fried chicken that people want at home. 

"We are a fried chicken restaurant first and foremost," Yoder said. "We have one 80-pound fryer where we old-school fry our chicken. It's not a pressure fryer—it's a true frying method that we use."

One of the knocks you hear around town is the high prices for fried chicken here, but one of the improvements to the menu has been a lowering of the prices for the chicken.  And everyone can be a critic on fried chicken, but try it at Blue Rooster. It's old school, simple, but the chicken and waffles dish isn't exactly no-frills.

"A good fried chicken comes down to the batter. The flavor of the batter, the amount of batter and cook time," Yoder said. "Even down to the correct oil being used. We went through three or four different oils before we ended up on a peanut oil."

Instead of flour, the chef uses a fine grind white cornflour to eliminate a greasy chicken, and puts a dash in cayenne pepper. If you're looking for extra spicy or something full of bursts of herbs for flavor, you won't find that here, but even with that basic taste of fried chicken, the breast and drumsticks were juicy and well cooked. The evidence didn't lie—the only thing left on the plate at the end of the meal were bones.

Yoder is big on not only fresh ingredients, but premium ingredients as well. The only thing he doesn't make in-house or especially order is the Duke's mayonnaise. 

The waffle involved with the chicken and waffles isn't your Waffle House waffle.

"It's not your traditional waffle whatsoever—people have to take out that preconceived notion of the 'Leggo My Eggo' waffle," Yoder said. The Blue Rooster waffle is essentially a bread.

He learned this method from a corporate chef who passed on the recipe from a "master of belgian waffles" in Brussles. The waffle includes stone ground grits, and pearl sugar. 

It's ingredients like the pearl sugar along with the work that goes into the waffle that really justifies the price for the dish—$18. The pearl sugar can only be obtained from two distributors in North America, and is imported from Europe, Yoder explained.

The reason he uses the pearl sugar is what it doesn't do—dissolve. The pearl sugar balls are rolled in butter and embedded into the dough, and when heated, gives a caramelized finish to the waffle.

And that's what Blue Rooster is all about—premium music, premium ingredients blended together in a way that makes you feel at home. You might not want to go back to your own home after a night out at the Rooster.

The Blue Rooster

1525 Fourth St.

941-388-7539

Hours: 5 to 10 p.m. Sunday-Tuesday; 5 to 11 p.m. Wednesday; 5 to midnight Thursday; 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. Friday and Saturday.

BlueRoosterSRQ.com

Facebook.com/BlueRoosterSRQ