Hogans Hideaway has been a neighborhood institution on Park Avenue for almost 30 years, since 1979, when Tom La Duca decided to turn the apartment behind his family's grocery and deli into a small restaurant initially called The Hideaway, and later Hogan's Hideaway, after a Korean contractor who worked for him. Hogan's grew on the strength of a very simple mission: make the food fresh, make the place welcoming, and keep it interesting so that people will want to come back again and again just to see what's new this week.

And people do come back. Some of them even end up working at the restaurant, among them Joe Spencer, who has been at Hogan's since 1985 and is now a partner in the restaurant, and Mark Greles, a bartender-manager who found his way to Hogan's through his wife who worked there at the time. Or pastry chef Diane Delorm, who is a dietician by day but produces perfect, flaky piecrusts and sinfully rich cookies at night for the restaurant. The place gets a hold on you and starts to feel like home very, very quickly.

Part of the charm of Hogan's is that it has wide appeal without over-reaching. The menu features everything from humble burgers on up to high-end blackboard "specials." Everything is at least good, sometimes even great, but it's the peripheral bits of the experience that stand out - bread and house salads, for instance. In four visits to Hogan's, I never had the same bread twice. The first night we were served a piping hot sourdough boule, crusty and smelling of yeast. The second, we had an onion bread speckled with bits of deeply caramelized onion and shot through with a subtle oniony flavor. The third night, we were served a whole grain bread. And on my fourth visit I tasted a glorious yellow egg bread (a challah in all but shape) studded with tiny pungent fennel seeds.

These same breads are the building blocks for the croutons that are tossed with Hogan's superlative house salad. I cannot tell you the last time I got excited about a house salad (perhaps never), but the house salad at Hogan's is simple, abundant, and delightful. Cool but not overchilled, the salad is full of crisp and flavorful green leaf lettuce, grape tomatoes, crunchy and moist carrot shreds, cucumber rounds, and the aforementioned croutons, then topped with the restaurant's homemade salad dressings - among them a tangy and savory lemon-pepper ranch that is so unlike a typical ranch as to deserve a new name of its own. This is the only house salad I think I will ever find myself craving.

Bread and salad don't make a restaurant, but they can make or break a meal. Here they whet the appetite for good things to come (and the bread acts as a convenient sop for sauces and soups as the need arises). The blackboard special menu consistently features a chicken dish, at least one steak, a couple of fish entrees, and something along the lines of a pasta dish or a pork entrée. We sampled chicken chasseur ($18), pan-seared salmon, and sautéed pork medallions.

Chicken chasseur is the French version of that time-honored comfort-classic, chicken cacciatore. Strips of breast meat were sautéed with crimini mushrooms, onions, garlic, and tomatoes and finished with a generous handful of herbs and wine to form a rich, silky "hunter" sauce. The chicken was remarkably tender and flavorful, complementing the sweetness of caramelized onions and tomatoes, the assertive bite of fresh garlic and herbs, and the deep berry notes of the wine used to deglaze the pan and turn all those lovely browned bits into a complex and fragrant sauce.

The generously portioned salmon fillet was seared beautifully and served over two sweet potato pancakes with a side of sautéed Swiss chard. This was a very well done piece of fish, and it contrasted well with the sweet and earthy taste of the sweet potatoes and the vibrant green of the chard. The sweet potato latkes were a bit too bready for my taste, but crispy and full of flavor.

The pork medallions were certainly the most "high concept" plate we saw at Hogan's. Slices of seared pork tenderloin on a bed of peppery wilted baby arugula were accompanied by substantial and tasty house-made raviolis stuffed with a dark, rich mushroom duxelle, and finished with a garlic and buttermilk "couli." This light buttermilk gravy threw the duxelle into high relief and gave the pork - which was slightly overdone - back a bit of the moisture that it had lost. I'm very fond of pork and mushrooms and pork and greens: combining them on one plate was quite satisfying, although not as soul-refreshing as the chicken chasseur.

Hogan's also turns out a solid menu of soups, salads, and sandwiches. The French onion soup ($3.75, $7.25 with salad and bread) is both classic and cliché at the same time: served in a crock topped with a thick and bubbly cap of melted cheese, the salty soup within was redolent of caramelized onions, wine, and good beef stock. The rye bread croutons provided a nice sharp counterpoint to the sweetness and fat of the soup. The seafood chowder ($4.75, $8.25 with salad and bread) was similarly quite good. Thick and rich enough to be a meal, this smooth, creamy potage was full of fish, shrimp, and vegetables with a very slight herbal under layer. As might be expected, Hogan's makes a very good spinach salad ($8.75), served with a velvety rich warm bacon dressing that starts the spinach wilting, parcooks the mushrooms, and accentuates the savor of crumbled bacon and hardboiled eggs.

Saving room for dessert is hard at Hogan's; the portions are large and savory and tend toward hearty, sustaining food. But missing out on dessert here would truly be a shame. Pastry chef Delorm is master of her craft. On my first visit I ordered a chocolate chip cookie ($1.75) that was half the size of a dinner plate and came drizzled with a homemade hot fudge sauce - sinful, buttery and irresistibly good. On a subsequent evening, I decided on the lemon coconut cream pie ($5.25), coconut cream, lemon curd, and whipped cream layered into a flaky, buttery pie crust that was itself a joy to eat. No coffee is necessary here. Just a cold glass of milk and a willingness to push the limit between comfortably full and outright, unabashed gluttony. 

Hogans Hideaway

197 Park Avenue | 442-4293

Monday-Saturday 11:30 a.m.-10:15 p.m., Sunday 4-9 p.m.