For most of us, the word “bistro” conjures a certain aesthetic and menu. Picture yourself in one, and you’re at a table covered with butcher paper spooning onion soup from a crock. A reproduction of Degas’s L’Absinthe hangs on the wall, and a waiter in a long apron brings you Pouilly-Fumé in a little stemmed glass. You’ll switch to red when the steak frites arrive. Vive la France.
While the cookie cutters keep stamping out variations of this restaurant, something fresh is afoot. In Paris there’s a burgeoning cadre of “neo-bistros” — neighborhood spots headed by a chef who prepares the familiar, affordable food you crave but updates it for a modern palate. Many feature wine lists more attuned to the natural revolution than the old orthodoxies.
Creepies may be Chicago’s first true neo-bistro. While not flawless, its blending of Midwestern and French influences in the year 2025 is tone perfect. Four years in the making, it is the second restaurant from David and Anna Posey, who run the Michelin-starred Elske next door. They’ve tapped their longtime employee Tayler Ploshehanski as chef de cuisine. “Seventy-five percent of the dishes are David’s conception, but I created all the recipes and executed everything,” Ploshehanski says. Knowing the way dishes come together on the plate at Elske, I recognize Posey’s influence. Yet I also taste Ploshehanski’s new-to-me culinary voice — one that is fond of thoughtful surprises, committed to the art of sauce making, and Francophilic to its core.
Despite the line drawings of furtive faces that crawl over the menu and dishware, there’s nothing creepy about Creepies. (The name was a joke when the Poseys were scouting divey-looking real estate, and it stuck.) Fashioned from two storefronts connected by a corridor, the dining room is anchored by a bold black-and-white checkerboard floor and incorporates pine wainscoting, a long mirrored wall with counter seating, exposed brick, and knickknack-filled alcoves. “They were going for Midwest basement meets French bistro,” says Ploshehanski. Indeed, both a rolling bread cart and a Ping-Pong table would seem right at home.
The oddly shaped space leaves no room for a bar, so Elske’s bar director, Monica Casillas-Rios, has created a small selection of two-ingredient cocktails that the waitstaff can mix into remarkably layered beverages. The blend of cognac and Byrrh (a bitter apéritif wine) plugged right into the Manhattan socket in my brain but gave it a different charge. In addition, wine director Emily Sher assembled an affordable natural list and is an enthusiastic proselytizer. She may suggest an oxidized Chardonnay with roast chicken or turn you onto Zumo Forest Drink, a juicy Grenache. Go with her flow.
Enjoy these first sips with warm gougères filled with Brie, which are crispy-sticky from a coating of Parmesan and honey, or the pistachio-studded sausage baked in puff pastry and served cold with sinus-clearing pistachio mustard. The pastry is a bit flaccid from the fridge, but the flavors are spot on. This recipe could be either the specialty of Aunt Shirley in Kenosha or a dish you loved at that spot in the 11th Arrondissement.
Ploshehanski knows that a bistro can only sell you on the chef’s experiments if it does some classics better than anyone else. She comes through: Her roast chicken is now the one to beat in Chicago, with golden crisp skin and flesh that’s firm and juicy from a cure. It’s a high-quality bird that you eagerly swipe through the winy, liver-enriched sauce. Her fries, too, can stop conversation — they snap like twigs and taste like butter. They are, in fact, partly fried in clarified butter and so delicious on their own that I had no interest in infringing on them with the garlic aïoli or onion chutney dips.
A good neo-bistro should also have dishes that get everyone talking. Here, it’s mussels in a buttery sauce with fennel giardiniera and a cumulus of Pernod foam. I may not love this dish but I admire it, and I need more fennel giardiniera in my life. The other talker: pan-fried Parisian gnocchi tossed with ham and Swiss and covered with a sheet of brik pastry that you shatter like a crème brûlée. This one is just stupid good. Try it, and let’s chat.
The entrées are shareable but vegless. There are three: that chicken the archangels make for God, Walter Payton, and Paul Bocuse; a nice enough lamb rack with a swaddle of Swiss chard; and a silky halibut fillet in a lobster-pepper sauce. These slurpable sauces cry out for the day when no one shared and a bread basket came free.
The cooking is ambitious, but the kitchen isn’t always up to the task. I want to recommend the pommes ratatouille — thinly sliced potatoes roasted until crisp in a pool of Provençal veggies — but I also want those potatoes to be cooked through. And while I love the idea of tavern-style tarte flambée, ours was dry, cold, and nearly burnt.
Service staff members also seem to be on a learning curve. They are lovely and enthusiastic, but it’s the little things: They stand at the front punching iPads excessively and make us wait too long for wine and water refills.
Still, Anna Posey’s desserts will send you out on a high note. I loved the crunchy-cool layered raspberry sherbet meringue cake as much as I had expected, but holy hell, the butterscotch custard — topped with crème fraîche, lemon rind, and a bitter chocolate cookie — had a narrative arc in every bite.
It all fits into the fully realized vision of French bistro meets Midwestern nice. Some recipes need tweaks, and the staff needs to better control the room. But Creepies tells this story so well that you lean in, rapt, ready for the next chapter.