After dinner in Albany Park with friends, they suggested a quick post-prandial detour to Belmont Tavern, an old-timey Avondale watering hole reborn as a cocktail bar, one they were starting to crush on. I could see why: the interior was one of those undisturbed Chicago timepieces, like the Whirlaway Lounge or Rainbo Room. The drinks were fantastic. Owner and veteran barkeep Nick Kokonas has resuscitated many of his signature creations from a decades-long career. Of the three we tried, there wasn’t one that tasted not quite there — the Casual Affair, a rye-on-the-rocks drink fleshed out with sour dark beer, is something I could order every time — and most impressively, they were all 12 bucks.
Other recent bar openings have taken the same tack, offering craft cocktails with craft galore — and belied by easy prices. Gus’ Sip & Dip started the $12 trend, and The Radicle with its $10 drinks took it even further. At The Alley Cat, the Wicker Park bar from the Paulie Gee’s team that opened this week, all 10 cocktails are $12. Instead of pushing interesting ideas onto top-shelf liquor, these spots basically invite you to stay for a second round, as easy on the gullet as the wallet.
Soon after that visit to Belmont Tavern, another friend sent along a thumbs-up report from Jinsei Motto — the sushi restaurant that had relocated from CH Distillery in the West Loop to the former home of Testaccio in Logan Square. Here, chef-owner Patrick Bouaphanh takes advantage of the site’s wood-burning oven to create such dishes at broccolini with sesame and chili crunch and roasted sablefish. But his high-quality, fairly priced sushi is this restaurant’s main draw with omakase options that cap out at $95. You can even enjoy an eight-piece nigiri assortment for $39.
Bouaphanh is going head to head with Andrew Choi, his former partner at Jinsei Motto who opened Omakase Box nearby with its paradigm-shifting $98 omakase. Halfway between the two lies Nomonomo Sushi, which offers a slightly more modest $79 omakase that the website curiously touts as “70 minutes at the Sushi Counter.”
I promise I have a point, but before I get to it let’s take a moment to appreciate Chicago’s hottest new restaurant, All Well, from Oriole’s chef-owner Noah Sandoval and former chef de cuisine Larry Feldmeier. Instead of opening with another full-on tasting menu with a dozen or more courses, they’ve resuscitated the almost moribund idea of a prix fixe — a mere five courses for a not-insane $120 that includes making a few choices. Decades-old restaurants like Sepia and North Pond still use this model, and every time I visit one I’m reminded of how nice it is to go out for a special meal that isn’t three hours long and desperately elaborate — and also to have the opportunity of choice: sea bass or Wagyu?
Craft cocktails. Sushi omakase. Tasting menus. These are the products of rock-star creators we’ve learned to seek out, recognize, and maybe even lionize. They bring the best products on the market — the best in the world, really — and fashion them into one-of-a-kind taste experiences. This, we’ve long understood, is a costly endeavor. If a cocktail is $27 or a menu $225, that’s what you pay for a brush with genius. For those who are neither rich nor have generous dining expense accounts, it’s a splurge.
Yet the sands are shifting, right? The K-shaped economy has made for an odd situation in the dining world whereby the options are crowded at the top but more hollowed-out in the center. This has created an opportunity of which creators are taking advantage. I appreciate feeling freed from that anxious voice constantly translating the price of dinner into plane tickets or a couple rounds of drinks into show tickets. How much nicer it is to not think about money, lean in and say to yourself, “Wow, this is good.”
Would you like a nice fish?
Then may I suggest the pla sam rod at Zaab-E-Lee, an Albany Park restaurant that joins Tuk Tuk Thai Isan Street Food, Immm Rice & Beyond, Noodles Party, Eat Fine, and Ghin Khao Eat Rice in offering Thai street food with an emphasis on the high-contrast cooking of the country’s Northeast. We tried a few dishes, and the one I cannot stop thinking about is called pla sam rod. It is a whole fish (in this case a tilapia) that is scored clean to the bone and eased into hot oil to cook, a fish very much like the red snapper you might eat in coastal Mexico or the pomfret in Southern India. Here, the fish spends enough time in the oil that its flesh, while still white and flaky at the bone, has largely turned amber brown and crispy crackly. It is then drowned in a three-flavor sauce (sweet, sour, salty) and blanketed in handfuls of fried shallots, cilantro, and tomato dice. It is spicy and sticky and we cleaned it with forks, spoons, and finally fingers until nothing but its skeleton, tail, and excavated head remained.
Quick Bites
The breakfast sandwich at Allez Cafe, which its website describes as “viral,” is certainly a squishy handful of flavor with its egg souffle patty, bacon, hash brown, onion aioli, and jalapeno jam. I kind of felt like I was holding onto a human heart during a botched surgery when it started to fall apart in my hand, but the flavor was bliss-inducing. I also returned to Manchamanteles to try another of chef Geno Bahena’s famous moles. I picked the most out-there one on the menu, a rose petal mole made with chestnuts, anise, and prickly pear to garnish a stuffed chicken breast. It was very sweet, and I think next time I’ll go back to the mole negro.