A scene from Balsan’s Sunday Supper
Six nights a week, Balsan is a standard (noisy, pricey) hotel bar with above-average food; you can get a $15 hamburger or $60 worth of suckling pig. But on the seventh, chef Danny Grant, who also helms four-star sibling Ria, offers Sunday Supper—a lovely, bountiful meal for $29. The menu changes from week to week, but our recent dinner included salads topped with lobster and quail, entrées of escolar and tender leg of lamb, sides of farm beans and trofie pasta, and funnel cake with blueberries. If Grant is clearing out his larder at week’s end (Ria is closed Sundays and Mondays), he has found an extraordinary way to do it. Elysian Hotel, 11 E. Walton St.; 312-646-1400.
Photograph: Anna Knott