Some friends of ours ate here a couple of weeks ago and raved about it, so we thought we would give Two Urban Licks a try.  It’s 3 miles from our work location, and getting there could not have been easier.  It’s located in an old industrial district that has been refurbished into apartments and yes, a restaurant.  It takes some detective work to find, but the search is well worth it.

The dining space is as big as a warehouse, probably because the place used to be a warehouse.  The owners did a great job remodeling the building.  The centerpiece of the whole place is the kitchen, which is smack dab in the middle of things and features a huge wood-fired grill where they grill steaks, burgers and pork chops.  This makes the restaurant a bit smoky, but it’s that nice campfire smell, not the noxious fumes of cigarettes.

We each started off with a beer.  Our waitress, Kelly, informed us that this is much more of a wine place, but we are beer people.  I had an Irish Numbers (the house “black and tan” made with Guinness and their own ale), which was quite refreshing on a hot day.  Eve ordered a Terrapin Sunray Wheat, but they were out of it, so she settled for a Blue Moon instead.

We were told that the salmon chips were the most popular appetizer, so we ordered some.  Expecting some sort of thin-sliced chips of salmon, instead we were pleasantly surprised to find flaked smoked salmon on top of house-made potato chips that had been smeared with cream cheese.  A tasty way to start the meal.

We considered the low country boil for our main course, but with that roaring fire a few feet away from our comfortable booth, we decided that we needed something cooked on that grill.  We went for the bistro steak, a 10 oz. hunk of meat with whipped potatoes, and a bean, corn and shitake mushroom side of veggies.  They cooked that steak to perfection, and like the salmon chips, it did not last long.

Dessert was perhaps the hardest choice on the menu.  Would it be bread pudding, smores, or peach cobbler?  Since peaches are in season and we were assured the peaches in the cobbler were fresh, we ordered the cobbler.  It came with molasses ice cream and both soon vanished from that plate.  It was my turn to lick the plate, but I behaved myself and scraped up every bit of food with a spoon.