The 42-ounce Mishima tomahawk steak Photos: Nick Murway RPM Steak 66 West Kinzie Street River North Steakhouse $$$$$ The options on this meat palace’s menu are so numerous that they can create temporary paralysis: Do you get the 90-day dry-aged ribeye? The three-ounce portion of wagyu? Béarnaise? Foie gras butter? Luckily, you can’t go … Read more
Rohan duck Photo: Jeff Marini Leave it to Grant Achatz to master both fine dining and chicken salad. At our top spot, Alinea, his food hits creative new heights, but at Roister, cozy treasures abound. Settle in at the kitchen counter, where, over a roaring open hearth, executive chef Andrew Brochu and his crew can … Read more
Fried chicken Photos: Jeff Marini Paul Fehribach has been a semifinalist for the James Beard awards five times, authored a scholarly American cookbook, is the creator of arguably the best fried chicken in Chicago, and may just serve the city’s finest brunch. It’s quite a résumé for the chef of a relaxed Southern restaurant in … Read more
Venison tartare Photo: Jeff Marini Bellemore 564 West Randolph Street West Loop Contemporary $$$$ Jimmy Papadopoulos is the kind of chef who gets excited about a fridge full of dry-aging ducks. There’s one such appliance in the basement of Bellemore, one of the Boka Restaurant Group’s latest offerings, and Papadopoulos has used those ducks … Read more
Ragù alla napoletana Photos: Jeff Marini At Monteverde, pasta is everything. Chefs in the mirrored open kitchen can be seen working flour and wheat and whey. You can watch others rolling dough and feeding it into the extruder, and still others draping noodles to dry them on racks adjacent to the butcher-block bar or selling … Read more
Pork belly with squash purée Photo: Anna Knott Tanta 118 West Grand Avenue River North Peruvian $$$ Consider Tanta the antidote to the overstuffed River North restaurant scene: colorful and lively without turning into a cliché of itself. The restaurant draws on Peru’s multicultural culinary influences, in particular Japanese (evident most notably in the … Read more
Birria with all the fixings Photo: Jeff Marini Birrieria Zaragoza 4852 South Pulaski Avenue Archer Heights Mexican $ Get your goat at this institution of birria, the heady Mexican stew typically made with meat from the aforementioned animal. Juan Zaragoza started making the stuff in this storefront in 2007, and since then he’s garnered … Read more
Pan-seared whitefish Photo: Jeff Marini For 14 years, Vie has endured a stream of backhanded compliments: “I can’t believe this restaurant is in the suburbs!” “It’s totally worth the drive!” As if there were some unwritten rule against opening a top-level restaurant outside the city limits. Enough already. Vie is a terrific restaurant, full stop. … Read more
White tuna tacos Photo: Jeff Marini To be clear: Arbor is a weird restaurant. It’s in an office building, on the second floor, and accessible only by an escalator. The cement-walled dining room has no windows to the outside, giving the place the distinct air of a Scandinavian minimalist’s idealized version of an institutional mess … Read more
Seared cabbage Photos: Jeff Marini Should you be inclined to ask, the owners of this sunny Logan Square cafe will happily tell you the name and location of the farm or dairy or mill that produced every ingredient in your perfectly burnished croissant, your sumptuous canelé, or your fluffy buckwheat-molasses muffin. But you don’t have … Read more
