I love fine dining. I love everything about it: the clean lines of the room, the freshly-laundered linen napkins, the crisply-efficient servers–and the food, dear god, yes, the food. Proteins I’ve seen a thousand times, done in ways I’ve never seen before, vegetables I’ve never heard of, preparations simple and baroque. I love it. It makes my heart beat faster to think of it.
But, truthfully, not so much lately, and by “lately” I mean in the last year or so, maybe more. I’ve been to all the usual suspects, all the new! exciting! fine-dining places that made Chicago’s top 24 (or however many it was) best new places, or the Reader’s Mike Sula’s excellent blog, and in general my reaction has been: meh.
Or sometimes less-than-meh. Take Mercat a la Planxa, for example. I went there with MelissaW on a snowy night last winter, having walked across town from my client’s offices in the West Loop. I was wet, cold, and I wanted one thing above all others: a glass of wine. Red wine. Good red wine. So we sat down, ordered a glass…and was told by the server that it wasn’t on the list anymore. Fair enough; lists evolve with menus, or even on their own. So I ordered another one (which the server corrected my pronunciation of–incorrectly, by the way). When it came, it was off. We told the server, he looked at us suspiciously and asked, “Off how?” “Um, off like it tastes like a mixture of oak and feet.” At which point, to our disbelief, he brought it to his nose to sniff. (I was thinking at that point, “Dude, if you take a taste, you’ve just earned a $.01 tip.” He refrained–but I could see it was a struggle that tried his very soul.) As for the food, I found everything but the lamb chops a la planxa pretty much drastically overseasoned or drastically underseasoned. I mean, I can see one or the other, but really: both? We agreed that we might go back for the lamb chops, but not in any big hurry, and we’d eat them at the bar.
Oh, and the cost? Prepare to sell a kidney. It’s a recession, guys. I know you’re in a hotel and you get a lot of tourists with expense accounts, but if you want regulars, you’d best try to rope the locals in too. With that service and food, at these prices, that’s not going to happen.
If it were only this one place where my opinion diverged so wildly from the conventional wisdom, it wouldn’t bother me so much. But all last year, my friends and I went to highly-puffed fine-dining restaurants that were B- experiences for us. Province, Powerhouse: I cannot remember a single thing about either, save that the highly-touted corn muffins at Province were dry and Powerhouse closed in less time than it took to put up a sign claiming they had a gas leak. Similarly Perennial (what’s with all the P-names, fine-dining restauranteurs?): great idea, love the concept–cannot remember a single thing about the execution.
By way of contrast, I can remember pretty much everything I ate at Publican the last several times I went there. If Publican is fine dining, and I suppose it is, though it feels much less…formal and pretentious than a lot of the fine-dining entries that have sprung up this past year, then it’s fine-dining done properly, with grace and wit and respect for the food and the diner. I may not want everything on Publican’s menu–though I often do–but by damn I’m going to want something. If nothing else, I can always fall back on the spicy freshly-made pork rinds and the awesome smoky-sweet country ribs, preferably accompanied by a smoky (!) Schenkerla Hellas beer (I know: smoky beer? I do not lie) (well, I do, but not at the moment); its even-smokier brother, Schenkerla Rauchsbier, was described by one waitress as, “like bacon in a glass.” May I just say: mmmmmbaconinaglassmmmmmm. Publican has rapidly become one of my favorites; I’ve been back probably 15 times since it opened. Besides being fine-dining done properly, and despite what would seem to be an emphasis on not ripping off the customer, I’m betting that Publican is also fine-dining done profitably, since the secret to restaurant success is repeat business, and I know I’m not the only one who’s been back and back and back there.
I don’t want to give short shrift to Sepia either, because Sepia, and let me be clear on this, has been and continues to be brilliant. But I will be devoting a whole post to Sepia later, and it’s not one of the restaurants that opened in the past year (though, with a new chef, it might as well be).
So my friends and I, the people who are writing this blog, have been mostly visiting neighborhood and ethnic restaurants of distinction (or, sometimes, of notoriety). Lao Sze Chuan, VeeVee’s, Chickpea, Mana, Chilam Balam: good places with only good food and (sometimes) good service to recommend them. We’re staying away from Sunda because, well, pan-Asian for trendies: how nice for everyone concerned. Sure, we went down to Pilsen to visit Nightwood, and were glad we did, because, dude, have you seen the pork chop there? It has an inch of fat, and could easily be something Publican served. (My highest praise.) But until something changes, the economic climate, the attitude of fine-dining restauranteurs, my tolerance for boring food and snotty waiters, we’re pretty much off fine-dining.
I do kind of miss the linen napkins, though.
