In the early ’90s, lines of hungry hopefuls used to stack up at breakfast time when Wiley’s was a tiny 10-seat place at Middlebridge in Narragansett. The trouble in luring good waitstaff to the more remote location kept people away in droves when it moved to Matunuck. For the last year, Wiley’s has been back in Narragansett, its menu and reputation intact. As with a finally settled family dispute, all is forgiven and the place is thriving.
Traditions have been maintained. The décor is still Southwestern, with Navajo blankets, a steer skull on a wall and ristras, those decorative bundles of red chilis, dangling like fiery chandeliers. “Eat the Heat” is the restaurant’s slogan, and the red fish skeleton above the motto may have resulted when a volunteer plunged generously into a pot of well-spiced soup. The ambience is that cheery, and since Wiley’s now has a liquor license, the mood can only improve. All 16 wines are available by the glass, and there’s a litany of martinis. (Don’t think that this joint has gotten too sophisticated. A sassy wall sign says: “If you’re smoking in here, you’d better be on fire!”)
Fish and fire — the combination pretty much sums up the best choices. Always a favorite of regulars, the flounder Sante Fe ($12.95), coated in crushed blue and yellow corn chips, is not at all greasy, as memory serves. (I also remember a waitress saying that a thick batter coating would be “an insult to the fish.”) We came at dinnertime, but several items popped off the lunch page. Crab cakes Benny ($12.95), for example, are toppled with poached eggs and a chipotle Hollandaise, the most imaginative eggs Benedict substitution I’ve ever seen. I like to think it was invented in a burst of inspiration when they ran out of English muffins.
The kitchen-made crab cakes are available as appetizers in the evening ($3.95 for one, $7.50 for two). We had the Wiley’s spicy fried calamari ($7.95), which presented small and tender rings tossed with the sauce for their Buffalo wings (10/$8.95, 20/$14.95). Calamari Vincenzo ($8.95) is more conventional, tossed with olives and garlic.
There were eight entrée specials on a marker board at the entry, several of which might likely graduate to the regular menu, we were told, as diners vote by ordering them. I’m glad that the salmon Del Rey ($18.95), my choice, is always available. The thick slab of Atlantic salmon is topped by a cream sauce that’s very light on the chipotle, so as to not drown out the quiet taste of the fish or the big, plentiful chunks of lobster in the sauce. I hadn’t realized how the flavors of lobster and that particular fish complemented each other so well, but the merger is worthy of an IPO. If only they could mate.
Johnnie chose a special, the grilled swordfish with pistachio-butter ($21), mainly because the fish had just come in. It was fresh and delicately delicious — and a popular item, we were told — but salted pistachios, although tasty right out of the shell, bland-out under fire. They provided texture, but the butter was the flavor addition. Johnnie enjoyed her red-bliss garlic mashed, as I did my wild-rice pilaf. Oddly, coleslaw was the “vegetable.” We had to get zucchini and yellow squash as a separate side, but they were nicely sautéed, rather than steamed.
