Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Read the transcript below.

Amy Cavanaugh: Welcome to Dish From Chicago Magazine. I’m Amy Cavanaugh, Chicago magazine’s dining editor.

John Kessler: And I’m John Kessler, Chicago magazine’s dining critic.

Amy: Today we’re talking about our Best New Restaurants list, which is published in our April issue and up online today. Plus, we’ll also share the best things we’ve had to drink lately, which includes a matcha cocktail at a River North newcomer.

Amy: John, it’s our Best New Restaurants list. This is our marquee dining feature each year. It is, it’s one of the most fun and challenging. And I am grateful that you write it for us and I just help you pare down the list, because it is always hard to do.

John: It’s so hard and naturally— I mean, I think what you offer me is not so much editing as therapy, as I just, like, wring my hands over this. And I’m like, Oh God, Amy. I don’t know. I just I love the place so much, but I just had this really horrible thing there. And what am I gonna do? But I really love it.

Amy: There’s definitely a lot of discussion about every element of the restaurants, from the food to the service to the ambience to the beverage programs to, you know, one meal is fantastic and one meal misses, and how do we handle it? But we’ve ended up with what I think is a super, super fun list of 13 restaurants, which, we haven’t had a list this long in years, which is, you know, I think a sign of some really solid restaurants to open in the past year. 

John: That’s true? 

Amy: Yeah, yeah. The past couple have been 11. So I’m really happy to see some, you know, a longer list this year. And I’m just generally excited by the range of restaurants. We have restaurants all across the city. We have a very wide variety of cuisines and styles of restaurants, from tasting menus to very casual spots. We have multiple pizza places. We have all-day cafes, we have omakases. And I think it’s a very exciting list, and I’m excited to dig into it. So, at No. 13 we have Sho. 

John: Yes. So Sho omakase is a restaurant in Old Town on Wells Street. It is right next door to Kamehachi, which is one of the original Japanese restaurants here. A scion of the family that opened Kamehachi, Adam Sindler is one of the two chefs at Sho and the other one is Mari Katsumura, who is quite well known. She’s the daughter of Yoshi Katsumura from Yoshi’s Cafe, the beloved French-Japanese restaurant in Lake View that closed a few years ago. And she then was the chef at Yugen, the restaurant that replaced Grace when that closed in the West Loop. Together, they have this great little 12-seat omakase counter, and what they’re serving is the food of their heritage. It’s Japanese, but it’s not really traditional Japanese. There are Japanese flavors involved. There’s a whole part of the menu where you have hand rolls that you assemble yourself, but it isn’t really sushi. There may be one or two dishes with raw fish, but nothing about it is traditional. Loved the the opening volley of just beautiful little bites that were set up in kind of a rock garden that’s put in front of you with this delicious, crunchy nori cone filled with egg salad and topped with caviar. 

Amy: Oh, that I had that that was delicious. 

John: Wasn’t that good? I love the way they got that nori so crispy. Did you have the chawanmushi they do?

Amy: I had the chawanmushi. I think our meals were similar, but kind of diverged at the end, because I did not have the green tea soft serve that you were enamored with. And that sounds so enticing.

John: I loved it. I know a really good friend of mine went after I did, and she said, like, Oh my god, I loved everything about it, except for that awful green tea soft serve. I mean, you know. Chacun à son goût. But it was really, I loved it because it was with red beans and then a drizzle of sweetened condensed milk that was fortified with sake leaves. So it had this just weird funk to it that I like. I just thought was fantastic. So, yeah, it’s a, it’s a fun restaurant. It’s not too much food. I think it’s a good size. It is a bit, it is a bit richer than what I think of as Japanese food. You know, there’s a little, there’s a goodly amount of butter fat involved in this meal. But I think it merits it.

Amy: At No. 12, we have Pizz’amici. 

John: Yes, Pizz’amici. I mean, I feel like I’ve got I’m telling a story that everyone’s heard a few times over, but it is a restaurant from the couple that really helped jump start the whole, you know, thin crust, tavern-style pizza craze. They are Billy and Cecily Federighi. They’re the folks that had Eat Free Pizza as a pop-up in their apartment. They went to Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream down in Bridgeport in the Maria’s complex with Kimski. Then they went to Kim’s Uncle Pizza in Westmont. And now they are here. It’s really delicious, thin-style pizza. It’s a cute little joint with just what you want a little Italian restaurant to look like. I mean, it looks like an Italian restaurant out of Mad Men or something, and they are nice cocktails. There’s a good salad, really beautiful focaccia. It’s getting possible to get in there. Everyone should try it.

Amy: Absolutely, yeah. I, I’ve been a couple times. I went a couple months ago and really had a wonderful meal. We sat at the bar. The pepperoni negroni is delicious, and so I highly recommend that. And I found my—

John: Pepperoni, pepperoni negroni? really? 

Amy: Really good. I also found my new favorite pizza topping combo. We wanted two pizzas because we knew we wanted some leftovers. So of course, we got sausage and giardiniera, which is fantastic. But then we we got pepperoni, onion, and garlic, and it was so fantastic with their crust, with their sauce, we liked it even better than sausage and giardiniera. So next time you guys go: pepperoni, onion, garlic with a pepperoni negroni. Fantastic meal.

John: Wow, that sounds fantastic. I’m like, what’s happening? What’s going on tonight?

Amy: Yeah. All right, and No. 11 is Nine Garden. 

John: Yeah. So Nine Garden is a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown that just won this year’s Banchet Award for Best Heritage Restaurant, and it feels like a breath of fresh air in Chinatown, because every time I go, it just seems that all these big chains out of Asia are moving in and taking over older restaurants there. It’s just there’s a lot of ramen, sushi, hot pot places with multiple locations all around the world, and this is a restaurant that is just, it’s family owned. It’s a mix of cuisines, but there’s a lot of Shanghai food there, which is really what their strong suit is. Definitely go and get the lion’s head meatball soup. It’s a huge, fluffy ball of softness, made from crab and pork and lots and lots of fat, whatever it takes to make it that soft. That is sort of the must-order. But then also, they do a really good version of dongpo pork, the red cooked pork belly. And it’s just, it’s a huge menu, and you’ve been right? You loved it.

Amy: I have my favorite. We had this, like, chile fish. That was phenomenal. But yeah, we also just had a great experience, you know, being there and we went on like it was either a Friday or Saturday night, and they were offering everyone else, you know, another round of cocktails to just kind of keep the party going, which I loved. So we ended up hanging out for even longer than intended, and really just such a nice experience there. So, yeah, the menu is huge. You know, get the get John’s favorite dishes, but then also just try other things, because there is so much cool stuff. 

John: Yeah, there’s so much there. 

Amy: So at No. 10, we have another pizza joint, Zarella Pizzeria & Taverna.

John: This is the restaurant from the Boka Group that is in River North. Two chefs, Lee Wolen and Chris Pandel, each making a style of pizza they wanted to perfect. Wolen’s is what they call a quote-unquote classic pizza, which is just a beautiful pizza with a bubbly crust and a nice kind of crispness in the undercarriage, absolutely delicious. And then Pandel is making this, his version of a tavern pizza. But the menu itself has so many more good things on it. There’s a great kale salad. There is absolutely the best fried calamari I’ve had in this town. They do a delicious eggplant appetizer. The cocktails I thought were very good. The wine list is simple, but nice, and that is a restaurant I could just go back to on the regular.

Amy: I agree. It’s, it really hits the spot. And Kenny, my partner, likes the tavern style, and I like the artisan. So we have to get one of each pizza whenever we go. 

John: So it’s a little bit of the pattern here. 

Amy: Yeah. I love leftovers. Yeah. All right, so not far from our No. 10 spot, No. 9 is Crying Tiger.

John: Crying Tiger is from another big restaurant group, Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, working with Chef Thai Dang of HaiSous. It is Southeast Asian fusiony, sceney, beautiful cocktaily, impossible to get into. Fun thing going on there. I managed to get in there by going at 4 and pleading for a space there and promising I’d be out by 5:30. You’ve got to just like camp on the reservation book or arrive right at 4, but you should, because it’s really worth seeing. I heard a few grumblings about the quality of the food when it first opened. My experience for my one visit there was everything was very, very good, and I thought the food was super smart. One of my favorite dishes were the Chinese crullers that you often get served with soy milk for breakfast. But here they had been cut into sections and filled with shrimp paste and cooked like shrimp toast.

Amy: Those are good. My favorite was the duck confit penang curry, which I actually wrote about for the March issue. Fabulous. Yeah, I agree. It is still very much a very, very, very hot table, and so I’m also looking forward to going back once the heat kind of dies down a little bit. And you know, it’s a little bit easier to get a reservation, but fabulous cocktail program. Kevin Beary, Scott Kitsmiller, the duo behind Gus’s, loved the drinks there, right, which is right next door, yes. So Gus’s for a pre-dinner cocktail or a night cap.

John: Yeah, exactly. And it’s, you know, as I wrote in the guide, it’s kind of like Trader Vic’s, minus the offensive stereotypes. So it’s, it’s a really fun place.

Amy: Also really fun is No. 8, Noodles Party. 

John: Boy. This is a very Asian list this year, which I love, but there’s been so many great Asian restaurants opening. So Noodles Party. If you know that part of Chicago up on Lawrence Avenue, I think the neighborhood’s called Mayfair, you might see it as adjacent to Albany Park. You’ve seen the sign for a while. There was a kind of a fusion noodle restaurant called Noodles Party. However, a woman, a Thai woman named Aomjai recently started doing a pop up there a couple days a week and expanded it and eventually took over the business, and every week the menu changes. She’s got a repertoire. She has experience having cooked in a Thai night market since she was quite young, and her looking is fantastic. It’s, I think you’ll see a lot of Thai people there. It’s a lot of dishes they’re homesick for that they can’t find here very often. And so some items may be a little bit, will be things that you’ve never tried before. But may also, you may find you like them. You may find the flavors will be a little challenging. If you’ve never had like coagulated blood tofu, it looks exactly like what you think it’ll be. The taste is very mild, and it goes into a pink noodle soup that is sweet and sour. There are delicious versions of other Thai noodle dishes, like khao soi, the very turmeric-heavy curry soup that has fried noodles and a chicken leg and mustard greens in it, that’s fantastic there. And even some dishes that aren’t noodles, but are typical dishes you would find in a Thai night market are great there. I absolutely love the crispy pork that comes with a dip called nam jim jaew. And it is great.

Amy: I can’t wait to try it. All right. At No. 7, we have Mahari.

John: What a sweet restaurant. This is, it is in Hyde Park. It is a family-run restaurant. The chef is Rahim Muhammad, and it is a kind of pan-African diaspora style of cooking. So you will see some dishes that are seasoned— are call-out dishes, let’s say from Nigeria and other countries in West Africa, and some from the Caribbean, and others from the American South. I can just picture Rahim Muhammad is— you try his food, and you know, he’s the kind of chef who just really lets his palate guide him. Things come together that sound very complicated, the descriptions of the food, but you taste it, and he just has a real talent for creating flavors that just linger and bloom in your mouth and stay around for a while. My two favorite dishes right now are the rah-sta pasta he does with the spinach, mushroom, sun-dried tomatoes, and a coconut cream sauce with just gobs of fresh thyme and a little kind of heat on the back of it that just keeps the flavors going. I love his stuffed plantain with mushrooms. That’s my favorite vegetarian entree in the city.

Amy: That, that plantain is phenomenal.

John: And it’s such a sweet restaurant. At some point during the evening, you might see people come out of the kitchen and they’ll be banging a drum and just sort of calling people to pay attention to, to each other, to the communal act of eating. It’s really a charming place.

Amy: And at No. 6, we have Omakase Box.

John: Omakase Box is in Logan Square. It is that the missing link that I’m always looking for in sushi, you know, between price and quality, I eat sushi often enough that I am not embarrassed to say I will get it at Whole Foods, but I love to eat it at Kyoto, but I wish I could find more in the middle. And that is exactly what Omakase Box delivers. It is a group of people, or some of the people from Jinsei Motto, that great sushi bar that was in the CH Distillery in West Town. You remember that? 

Amy: Oh yeah. 

John: Yeah. It’s Andrew Choi, who was one half of the ownership team there, and he’s working with his old friend sushi chef Timmy Chen. You can get the Omakase there. It’s great. It’s 98 bucks, it’s 14 pieces. It’s very, very, very good quality, not huge pieces. But I honestly kind of like that a little better. Also. I like the non-omakase, because you can just go there, and if you just want to eat three pieces of delicious toro and some uni and some nice mackerel, a little bit of kanpachi. You know, the kind of higher-end things you don’t always see, you can just get that. 

Amy: I love that they offer both. 

John: That’s honestly, of all the restaurants on this list, that’s the one I’ve been to the most.

Amy: All right, at No. 5, we have Petite Edith.

John: Yes, ma’am, we have Petite Edith. This is from Jenner Tomaska, the chef at Esmé, the former chef de cuisine at Next. Esmé, you may know, is this Linkin Park restaurant that is a tasting menu done in collaboration with a local artist. So it’s a very food-as-art kind of place. This is not that. It is what he calls a bistro, and what I call a very high-end, fancy French restaurant. The food’s beautiful. It’s kind of expensive. It’s not killer-expensive. Seafood-heavy, very fun. He creates kind of classic dishes with a twist. I loved the stuffed pig trotter that he does. It’s a big old pig’s foot that he takes the skin off of, takes everything out of. He makes this mousse with foie gras and sweet breads. He serves it on super buttery potato puree with the delicious demi-glace sauce. But really his focus on the menu is seafood. There’s turbot with a nice crust, there’s monkfish. There are a lot of things you just don’t see anymore. It really is kind of a throwback in some ways, because it is just the kind of French restaurant that other people are not thinking to open.

Amy: I have not been here yet, and I’m very excited to go. So at No. 4, we have Cafe Yaya.

John: It’s getting exciting, we’re getting up here. Okay, Cafe Yaya is the second restaurant from Zach Engel and Andrés Clavero of Galit. It’s right next door. It is an all-day menu that they have there. It’s very good. I like breakfast. I like lunch. I love dinner. Dinner is the time to go there. He has such really fun dips that he’s put on the menu. 

Amy: Ugh, the dips. So good.

John:  So good. What’s your favorite one?

Amy: The onion, the onion miso. Caramelized onion miso.

John: Yeah, ridiculous, and it’s so good. I might be on, that new squash dip has kind of stolen my heart. 

Amy: It’s so good too. 

John: Yeah. I mean, honestly, you can just go there and just have wonderful wines by the glass and just eat dips until you just dip out. I mean, that’s, I just want to go there and just dip and dip. But, I mean, there’s way more to the menu. It’s good.

Amy: Yeah, the pork schnitzel is fantastic to me. That is a must-order there. And the lamb burger I had on my last visit, we had that on our Best Things We Ate This Year list, and that’s excellent. All right. Top three. At No. 3, we have Nadu.

John: Nadu is the fourth business in Chicago that Sujan Sarkar has a hand in. He is the chef behind Indienne. It is a regional Indian restaurant, and it’s not from any particular region, but it’s kind of the best hits of different dishes from throughout India. His chef there is Sanchit Sahu, who has cooked all over India. He worked for the Taj hotels and worked at properties throughout India. So he knows a lot of the different regional styles, and it’s very fun. It gives you a good sense of what India is all about. I have a few things that I kind of always want to order there. I love their tangra chile fish, because it’s just— there’s something about Indo-Chinese cooking that has a flavor that just speaks to me. I think that’s great. Also, his dosa is just killer. It’s not like a, it’s not like the kind of dosa you get in Chennai, the Tamil Nadu style that’s really thin and crisp. This is one from, he’s from Bangalore, and the dosas there are a little like crisp on one side, but fluffy on the other.

Amy: Very fun, all right. And No. 2, we have Atsumeru.

John: So Atsumeru, I know, which we talked about in the last podcast episode is from Chef Devin Denzer, who’s from Minnesota. It’s a seafood-heavy restaurant. There’s not a lot of great seafood in Minnesota, and he never grew up eating it, but he fell in love with it. It’s Nordic-Japanese. He’s not been to Scandinavia, he’s not been to Japan, but he has a very good sense of those flavors, and he is preparing a tasting menu that comes in at a reasonable price with a very lovely progression of flavors. It tells a nice story. The flavors all sort of speak to each other from course to course, and you just get this very clear sense of kind of cold weather cooking in it. I mean, maybe that’s where the Minnesota comes in.

Amy: That’s true. Yes, he, you know, he has that dish that is inspired by winter in Minnesota, that little pre-dessert. So I think he, he really understands those cold weather, seafood-heavy cuisines. 

John: Yeah. 

Amy: No. 1, which, as listeners of this podcast will probably not be surprised to hear, is Creepies, the new, the second restaurant from the Elske team.

John: Yeah. It is the husband-and-wife team of David and Anna Posey, but they’re working with a chef there named Tayler Ploshehanski, who has worked for them for a long time, worked for some other places around town. I don’t know. Man, that is just the most fun. That is the restaurant that even if I don’t love everything I’m eating, I just always want to go back there. It is so outside of the box, it’s such a cool room. I love the staff there. I can’t tell you how much I love the staff there, because they just, there just so, there’s no pretense to it. They just are like such nice people who are all themselves, who know the food inside and out. And the food is just its own weird self, you know. I mean, where else you gonna get like, celery root gratin with snails in it, or mussels under a cloud of giardiniera foam? I mean, you don’t see that stuff every day. 

Amy: You don’t. And I like people being weird. I like people trying something new, but it works. Like not every weird experiment that that chefs have works. But here it’s like, even if a dish is not your absolute favorite, it’s fascinating. It really is an original restaurant. And, you know, it’s not, that’s not something we’ve, I feel like we’ve seen a lot of lately. It’s this combination of French and Midwestern which naturally works here in a very cool way. And, yeah, I mean, I agree with you, like our service. I’ve only dined here once, and I’m dying to go back, but, you know, my service was, like, notably fantastic and helpful and really made the experience fun. And yeah, the room is super weird, you know, two adjoining rooms, but it works. And you know, it’s a room you want to be in, and that’s what I’m always looking for when I dine out somewhere, is, is this a space that I want to be in? And if the answer is no, well then I will probably not go back. But Creepies is a room that, you know, you just you want to be in again and again.

John: It absolutely is. And you just want to keep exploring that menu, and it just, it’s, you get the feeling this is a restaurant that’s becoming something, you know, it’s not static. It’s not like, this is our version of x. This is a (blank) steak house, or this is our (blank), you know, Italian. It has its influences, but it’s remaking them. It’s remaking everything. And so I mean to me, it’s the most exciting restaurant, bar none to open this year.

Amy: So, that’s a super fun collection of restaurants. But, you know, you you dined out a ton for this. And so what were other kind of takeaways you had from the overall scene as a whole this past year?

John: I know there are a lot of restaurants I went to that we chose not to put on the list. My feeling was, I mean, there’s some things I was seeing over and over again, like the thing that struck me the most is I see very smart people really thinking about what Midwestern food means. You know, I came here after living in the South for 20 years, and I really saw when the South started to figure itself out as a restaurant culture, and how we were going to show what Southern traditions are in Southern cooking, but interpreted by chefs. And it was fun to watch that happening. And then when I came here, I never quite— like it always felt like Midwesterners were a little bit apologetic about what it meant to be Midwestern. And now I just find it’s like there’s a boldness to it. And I’m thinking, you know, Ox Bar & Hearth, which is a little too new to put on this list, but does that quite well. Petite Edith does it to some degree as well. And RA, which opened the year before, and has gone through a couple chefs, they’re really thinking about what it means to be Midwestern — you know, what the ingredients are, and so forth. So that was my biggest takeaway. Trends are, my God, there’s so many speakeasies like every place I went to it’d be like, Do you want to come down to our secret basement and, you know, drink a $14 cocktail? Of course, you know, yeah. So I went to a lot of secret basements for speakeasies, And then it’s a lot of hand rolls everywhere. Yeah, it was, I think it was last year, maybe the year before Nami Nori kind of set that off in New York with hand roll bars. But man, have we got some hand bars happening now. Noriko is really fun. I liked it a lot. I didn’t think it was like great, but I really enjoyed going to Noriko and trying some of those hand rolls, but just everywhere. Anything else you noticed?

Amy: Yeah, I feel like those are really the big things. But yeah, I think that this Midwestern food question is one I really want to watch, because I am seeing it in other cities as well. You know, Cordelia in Cleveland is really embracing and running with these classic Midwestern dishes. And as someone not originally from the Midwest, it is super fun and exciting for me to see this and understand and know what these dishes mean to people here. There’s this St Louis restaurant that I am dying to go to called Mainlander that’s like a modernized supper club. It’s happening in Wisconsin, and so it is a topic that I’m super excited about and really eager to see how that evolves in Chicago as well. Because I think that it, that excitement around Southern food that was happening when you were seeing bourbon cocktails and fried chicken on every menu everywhere, because people finally realized that Southern food was cool. You know, kind of like mid-2000s, 2010. I feel like we’re starting to see here with Italian beef and tavern-style pizza appearing on menus all across the country. So, very, very eager to see where this goes. So to me, that was the big takeaway from the year that I’m also most excited about.

John: Yeah, no, it is. It is fascinating. I think it’s just people are loosening up enough to do what they want to do. I mean, I just, there is a lot more experimentation happening at the mid-level, which I’m really excited about. I mean, you know, God love a tasting menu, but just to see people creating super original food at the mid-level is like, what makes the city great I think. 

Amy: Well, John, what’s the best thing you drank lately?

John: I gotta be honest, I have been eating out so much that I kind of like to, would not have the cocktail and the wine. And I like the wine too much. So my favorite cocktail right now is a bottle of nonalcoholic Fentimans rose lemonade. Whenever I see that on a menu, I go for it. It’s bitter and interesting and delicious, and it tastes like, you know, rose water, but not in like a grandma’s curio drawer kind of rose water flavor. It’s It’s really delicious, and it’s like my favorite aperitif. How about you?

Amy: Well, I just had a nice dinner at Akiro, which is the Nikkei hand roll bar in River North. So that is Japanese with Peruvian influences. And I had a matcha sour that was delicious. It was definitely the most popular drink, too. Everyone was drinking them. Pisco, matcha, coconut, lime, egg white. Frothy, bright, earthy, and really like a nice combo for the food. there. It’s hand rolls, as we were talking about, and how trendy those are, as well as nigiri. And we also have this, like, tiny, tiny little katsu sandwich that was delicious. But this, I would recommend this matcha sour with everything. It was really good. 

John: I love sometimes when a cocktail has a little bit of that astringent edge to it, you know, dries out your mouth and, you know, and matcha always does that so well.

Amy:  Yeah, really, really, really good pairing with with some food.