As much as I like a bar that also serves good food, I can't help but wonder if the keen attention paid to culinary details goes unappreciated — or at the very least, unnoticed — by the alcohol-soaked palates of the clientele.

Can you really taste a perfectly cooked rib-eye after a football game's worth of Newcastle? It's unlikely, but if you can (because you're one of the few humans whose taste buds are actually sharpened by alcohol), do you remember it in the morning?

Didn't think so.

So then, it's only right to borrow this space, which is usually reserved for proper restaurant reviews, to talk about a sports bar with really good food.

Kanpai Bar & Grill at 404 Ward Ave. is, so far, the best use of the space that used to be Dixie Grill and later, Tio's Garage.

The big, open, barnlike room has been taken over by the old Slammers Bar & Grill crew, who retained much of the Dixie Grill ambience — lots of wood, a seating nook with built-in booths and a surf-shack-style lanai — and added to it a dozen flat-screen televisions, all tuned to some game or another, a tangle of sports memorabilia, most of it Chicago-related, dart boards, electronic poker and trivia games, and something neither of the building's former occupants were able to offer: good food.

Since Kanpai is a sports bar and not a traditional restaurant, it took some nontraditional visits to really get a good feel for the place.

FRIDAY, 10:30 P.M.

On any Friday and Saturday night, Kanpai is packed with young townies who know that a place with a full bar, a solid late-night menu, no cover charge, no dress code and plenty of parking is the place to be.

A table with four chairs is prime real estate after 10 on a Friday, but if you're willing to eat and drink al fresco, there's always room on the lanai.

If you start with the more traditional bar food and work your way up to the more chefly dishes, you'll get a good sense of the chefs' (there are four of them, and all are former Alan Wong proteges) culinary vision.

As for the more traditional bar food, the garlic fries ($6) are exactly what you'd expect — thick crinkle-cut fries with a serious helping of minced garlic and salt — and the Karai chicken wings ($8) are a surprisingly fresh take on the traditional bar wings. The Karai chicken (does the name give away the chefs' fondness for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Or am I the fan?) is rubbed, not battered, with a blend of sweet and savory spices and then deep fried to set the coating and crisp the skin. It's a good wing variation that's more successful than most.

But if you're going to order chicken at Kanpai, get the spicy garlic chicken. For $8, it's an incredible value for a big basket of battered and fried chicken pieces with a melt-in-your-mouth coating and a drizzle of Korean-style sweet and spicy garlic sauce. Though you've likely tasted something like this before, it's the combination of the thick, crisp coating and the restraint with sauce — each piece has just the right amount — that make Kanpai's version so good.

Classing things up a bit, but still keeping it real, is the portion of the menu that includes what chef Neil Nakasone calls "upscale bar food."

The bar's signature wafu steak is a 12- or 16-ounce cut of New York strip ($16, $22), sauced with the traditional sake, mirin, shoyu blend and topped with braised mushrooms, grated raw daikon and garlic chips. The steak is served to order (we ordered medium; it came medium) on a sizzling platter.

The daikon topping might be difficult for some to swallow, but people accustomed to the flavor of the radish will like the added bite.

The kim chee rib-eye steak comes grilled to order, smothered in kim chee and topped with two fried eggs ($16 for a 12-ounce portion, $22 for a 16-ounce portion. The combination was right, but it was too salty both times I ordered it. A slight flavor adjustment to the steak would compensate for the saltiness of the kim chee, which would make the dish an incredibly edible combination of all the good stuff we were raised on at our local drive-in.

The preparation of the steaks at Kanpai is a reflection of the chefs' roots — local-style lowbrow grinds accented by years of high-brow kitchen experience. And no dish shows off that culinary clash better than the braised short-rib loco moco ($12), which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a loco moco whose blue-collar hamburger patty is replaced with braised, fork-tender short ribs, and then, like the original, two fried eggs are added and the whole thing is covered in brown gravy.

It's as good as you think it is.

SUNDAY MORNING, 8 A.M.

As a sports bar, Kanpai opens at 7 a.m. every Sunday during football season, and the early Sunday morning crowd is wildly different from the weekend night crowd. The early crew is older (they obviously weren't out clubbing Saturday night — they're here too early) and much more focused: They're here for the sports.

There's a different game on every TV set, with pockets of fans huddled around their team's game, cheering and drinking (morning liquor is the norm here) and eating.

For a hearty, no-frills breakfast, Kanpai isn't a bad choice at all. Though the breakfast menu is short — three items short — what they do have is good eating. Plus, there's an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet of scrambled eggs, rice and a variety of breakfast meats for a mere $8. I can drink to that.

The morning must-have item is the steak and eggs: a 12-ounce perfectly seasoned and seared New York strip steak, three eggs and two scoops rice ($17).

Other breakfast dishes include a country omelet and a rotating special, which last week was — what else? — eggs and meat, specifically kielbasa.

Sunday morning dress code: jeans, team jerseys and fanny packs.

MONDAY, PAU HANA TIME

Pupu fill the tables weekday evenings at Kanpai. Area professionals are starting to discover the place as ideal after-work noshing grounds.

It's comfortable, cheap and 'ono — and no one looks at you funny if you arrive in your stodgy office clothes. Or if you arrive in your boro-boro day-off clothes. Here, anything goes.

As much as it is anything else, Kanpai is a beer, burger and fries joint. The kitchen turns out a satisfying two-fisted burger that is, like the rest of the menu, somewhere between drive-in and restaurant. It's got the savory patty that's not too big, American processed cheese singles and that mustard-mayo combo that most of us associate with Rainbow Drive-In. But the patty, which isn't too small, either, is cooked to order and comes piled high with fresh veggies on a kaiser roll.

The burger, which comes with any combination of add-ons that includes a fried egg, sauteed onions and mushrooms, bacon and another patty, is juicy and just right for an $8 burger.

Kanpai does its biggest business at night, but it's also open daily for lunch, and stays open until 2 a.m.

For a sports bar, Kanpai makes a great restaurant, and for a restaurant, it makes a great hangout.