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
Bucatini with pecorino and clams Photo: Anna Knott Brian Huston’s American restaurant is the kind of down-to-earth Chicago neighborhood café that has communal seating and a rum cocktail named for WGN weatherman Tom Skilling. Huston (Evanston Township High School class of 1989) is a protégé of Paul Kahan and has a knack for pushing wham-pow … Read more
Photo: Anna Knott When it first opened in 2015, Band of Bohemia pronounced itself a “culinary brewhouse.” Except, one issue: The food didn’t quite live up to the astoundingly good beers. (Brewer Michael Carroll was, in a previous life, the head baker at Alinea, so he knows his way around yeast.) Since then, however, the … Read more
Lobster pie Photos: Jeff Marini Acadia 1639 South Wabash Avenue South Loop Contemporary $$$$ A world, if not that many miles, away from the thrum of the West Loop stands Ryan McCaskey’s consistently excellent haute dining den. McCaskey is an unabashed proponent of tweezer food, creating dishes with focused flavors and sculptural visual appeal. … Read more
