When my wife and I moved to the Rochester area almost a decade ago, one of the first restaurants we visited, largely because it was close to the condo we were renting, was Timothy Patrick's Irish Restaurant in Penfield. The pub became our frequent restaurant of choice, and once or twice a month you could find us holed up in one of the high-backed wood booths tucking into stroganoff burgers or superlative BLTs. It was a particularly good place to go during our first, brutal winter in the area, when every weekend was punctuated by a near-blizzard.

On snowy nights, a table snug up against the massive fieldstone hearth that dominates Timothy Patrick's dining room was a nearly ideal place to be, lingering over a pint as the weather outside went from bad to worse. But time passes, and it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago when the mercury finally dipped below freezing for a few days and a damp chill settled in that I thought about how pleasant it would be to return to an old haunt.

Timothy Patrick's has changed a bit in eight years - the five gigantic flat-screen televisions mounted in the bar and dining room are the most notable additions. Happily, though, most things have stayed the same. Opened in 1984, Timothy Patrick's was built by Tim Patrick Baumer to look and feel as much like an Irish public house as possible. Tiny windows, thick stone walls, hand-stitched banners bearing the arms of all of the counties in Ireland hanging from the open rafters, and the wide plank floors all evoke an out-of-the-way cottage in the countryside. It looks like some place to get in out of the rain (or snow, in our case) and have a pint.

Fortunately Baumer (and his nephew Philip Fiorella, who took over the place in 2007) wasn't so dedicated to Irish food. Certainly you can find bangers and mash and cottage pie (a variation on shepherd's pie) on the menu, and for what they are they aren't bad. But a hungry soul would do much better to order up a Guinness or Harp (or a black and tan, which the bartenders at Timothy Patrick's make particularly well) and stick to the pub menu of sandwiches, appetizers, soups, and burgers, which range from merely good to great.

The menu bravely attempts to keep with the Irish theme of the pub, unfortunately renamed "T.P.'s" when Fiorella took over management of the house. Cheeky names have been given to familiar dishes - "Soup O' the Mornin'," "Offaly Omelets," "The O'Reuben," and "Blarney Burgers" are particularly grim in this respect. But the food that comes out of the kitchen is entirely satisfying.

Start with a plate of boneless wings served with a tangy, spicy hot sauce, blue cheese dressing almost certainly made in-house, waffle fries, and a generous heap of celery sticks ($8.50). At first glance, the dish looks average at best, but the chunks of chicken are very well crusted and fried, dressed lightly in sauce and served quickly so they don't lose their crunch. The "glow in the dark" hot sauce on the side, a thick and chunky mix that's full of a nose-tickling quantity of red pepper and vinegar, is absolutely wonderful on the chicken, and even better on the waffle fries that come with the dish - particularly with a little dab of blue cheese to mellow it a bit. On one visit, we even started dipping the pub's generously cut mozzarella sticks in the stuff, loving the way that the vinegar cuts through fat like a sharp knife.

Follow that up with either a sandwich or a burger. My wife has always been partial to T.P.'s BLT ($6.95), and with good reason. The first time I saw the sandwich eight years ago, I was certain the kitchen had made a mistake: there had to be half a pound or more of crispy, mahogany-hued bacon in the sandwich. Easily 3" thick and served on bread that is actually toasted rather than browned (as too often happens), the cooks use a judicious quantity of mayonnaise and surprisingly good tomatoes (the thing that makes or breaks a BLT in the end). This is the best version of this diner-standard that I've ever found. The one that we got on a recent visit lived up to my fond recollection of it entirely.

Not so the stroganoff burger. In my memory, Timothy Patrick's stroganoff burger - an 8 oz. burger served on good rye bread and topped with fried mushrooms, brown gravy, and what the menu describes as "a generous dollop of sour cream" ($7.50) - is a comfort-food icon, one that I surely would be, again as the menu puts it, "Russian back for." The one I was served recently, while still good, seemed a bit more meager: long on brown gravy, short on mushrooms, and served on a slice of rye bread with a thin smear of sour cream to mix in with the gravy. The meat was cooked as ordered, the gravy was nicely savory, and the bite of the caraway seeds in the rye bread still livened the dish up, but it simply wasn't as wonderful as it was when the restaurant was under its old management.

Venturing out of the realm of nostalgia, on my last visit to T.P.'s I ordered an omelet. Not usually found on pub menus, omelets are something of a specialty at T.P.'s. The cook whips the eggs well and minds them carefully, producing a fluffy omelet stuffed with sauteed (but not overcooked) spinach and cheddar cheese ($6.95). The bacon that was supposed to be in my green-and-gold omelet was sadly missing, a salty element necessary to make the flavors pop. But our friendly waitress quickly remedied the situation, first offering to replace the dish and then supplying me with a generous side of bacon to bring an otherwise perfect set of textures and tastes together.

To find Timothy Patrick's in City Newspaper's online Restaurant Guide - including a map, user reviews, and more - click here.

Timothy Patrick's Irish Restaurant and Sports Pub

916 Panorama Trail

(585) 385-4160, tpsirishpub.com

Monday-Friday 11 a.m.-10 p.m., Saturday noon-10 p.m., Sunday 4-9 p.m. (bar open daily until 2 a.m.)