Capers Restaurant has been on Markham Street in west Little Rock since 1992, and Ron Trice has been behind it almost every day since it opened.
Trice is not a celebrity chef in the Instagram sense. He doesn’t do pop-ups or release limited-edition hot sauces. What he does is show up, cook with consistency, and run a dining room that feels like it belongs to the neighborhood rather than to some hospitality group in another city. That’s rarer than it sounds, and it’s the main reason Capers has outlasted a long list of Little Rock restaurants that arrived with more fanfare.
The building is low-key from the outside — a modest storefront in a strip of commercial Markham, the kind of block where you might drive past without stopping. Inside, the room is warm without being fussy: soft lighting, tablecloths, a bar that fills up early. On a Friday evening the noise level climbs steadily after six, and by seven you’re glad you made a reservation.
The menu is American with clear Southern and continental influences — the kind of cooking that was called “New American” in the nineties and has since just become what good mid-South restaurants do. Trice’s crab cakes come up constantly in conversation with regulars, and they’re worth the reputation: mostly crab, lightly bound, served with a remoulade that has actual heat in it. The beef tenderloin has been on the menu in some form for years, and it holds its place because it’s executed well, not because they’ve given up on changing things. The pasta dishes rotate more often, and the kitchen does better with them than a lot of places that bill themselves as specialists.
Lunch is quieter and worth knowing about. The crowd skews toward people who work nearby — lawyers, architects, a few state government types — and the pace is unhurried. The soup changes daily and is usually the right choice. Prices at lunch run $12 to $18 for most things, reasonable for the quality. Dinner is more, with entrees ranging from the mid-twenties up into the thirties for the beef dishes, but portions are generous and the kitchen doesn’t rush you out.
A longtime regular named Carol, who has been eating at Capers since the mid-nineties, put it plainly when I ran into her at the bar one evening: “I know what I’m going to get here, and it’s going to be good. I don’t always want to be surprised.” That’s not a backhanded compliment. Consistency is genuinely difficult, and Trice has built a staff that reflects it — several people in the kitchen and front of house have been there for more than a decade.
The wine list is serious without being intimidating, with a decent range by the glass and a bottle selection that rewards spending a few minutes with it. The bar program is straightforward, classic cocktails done correctly, nothing experimental.
If you want a meal that’s going to photograph well for social media, Capers probably isn’t your first stop. If you want dinner that’s been thought about, cooked by someone who gives a damn, and served in a room where the staff knows what they’re doing, it belongs near the top of your list. Thirty years in, Ron Trice is still showing up. That tells you something.
