It is unexpected that a midwest city not too far from the corn belt and industrial midlands wouldhave such a well rounded restaurant scene. Much of the food celebrity there is owed to Alinea, which is easily top 50 in the world and potentially the best in North America. Without the luck to secure a reservation at one of the most difficult to in the world, we settled for two alternate culinary institutions.
Grace, the other a three-star restaurant, is located in effectively Chicago’s culinary star walk (The Girl and the Goat is next door). The entrance feels definitively small-town like, the door obscured by a curb-side parking lot and camouflaged into a row of nondescript commercial real estate. Grace written in cursive etched into the wall is even less descript. The dining room is austere luxury. Tables in the middle that could seat parties of 6 are left for only couples, providing for seating that resembles a cruise show and the kitchen separated by the glass is the main event. The room is dimly lit, in contrast to the luminous kitchen.
To begin, three ceramic cups that roll around like Matryoshka dolls swing like a pendulum, stabilized by the soft grey cloth of the table. All three are delicious and a good start to this kind of restaurant.
The first spectacular course is the first course, packaged in a yogurt glass. A small smudge of yogurt is smeared on the foil that enclose the glass of yogurt. It’s mostly a cheap trick, but I’m not complaining. The paprika yogurt is viscous and warm; it wouldn’t remind you of a yogurt if not for the context. A soft steam floats out and when it dissipates, reveals a beautifully arranged collection of chanterelles and a small cylindrical block of rabbit in the same yogurt sauce. It has the artistic appeal of aboat in a bottle. It tastes the part too, with the milky yogurt loaded with paprika enough to cleanse the nostrils, with a punch of sourness to balance the chanterelles and pressed rabbit meat.
The next dish is just as impressive looking. A tuile (shard) of sugar encloses a cone-shaped glass bowl. Foliage and roe rest on top, and mixes with the crab below when cracked with a spoon. Like the previous dish, everything is intricately arranged though it’s more or less a mess by the time you start eating it, the little shards of sugar providing an interesting counterpoint to the crab and herb mix. Altogether, it tastes like a very fresh salad that you might get at a Japanese restaurant, where sweet salads are in vogue. It also tastes so fresh that it almost veers on tasting dish-soapy, probably from the punch of the sudachi fruit, which has a similar taste profile as a Meyer lemon.
The next dish is a tuna carpaccio, also intricately decorated with coconut, cashews, pearls, but is undifferentiated in any way. It is unclear why this is even a dish in an otherwise ambitious line-up. It is a small blip on the radar: the next dish is visionary. It’s a rillette of lamb in a sauce of red pepper but what makes it exceptional is a strip of bitter dark chocolate that somehow pairs beautifully with the lamb. the secret is that there is nothing sweet about the chocolate. It is deep, dark, bitter - a piece of culinary mastery in its own right. To use it in a main dish is exceptional.
From there are two mains that fail to live up the start of the meal. The truffle dish is oily, filled with carbs and unctuousness without anything to balance it out. it resembles something you’d get at a gastropub that you would need to down with beer. A few slivers of black truffle go to complete waste, competing against potato ravioli. The last of the mains is a very good cut of beef that is much too small to put up with all the watermelon, beets and iceberg lettuce (iceberg lettuce?). If a beef is very high quality, it should be allowed to stand on its own, not overwhelmed by other sauces. This was a dish that should have had a larger portion of a lower quality beef. It also felt a little cheap, especially in the context of the $235 price tag of the meal.
Desserts begin with two sorbets: blueberry and passionfruit, reminiscent of the French ice cream shop of the Île de la Cité, which is to say it was very good.
The final amuse is a little modernist cuisine ball of what is best described as a citronella cough medicine, which tastes a lot better than that description.
So with that ends a meal at another 3 Michelin star restaurant that is easily one of the top dining experiences in the world, yet is not perfect. It is also relevant to point out that the wine list is extremely good value. The final bill works out to be about $350 a person after wine, which is a good deal below Saison ($550) and French Laundry ($450 after substitutions). There were enough spectacular dishes to elevate the experience to art, and the misses were not disasters, just not exceptional. These days that’s all you can expect.
RABBIT
chanterelle, smoked paprika, GREEN GARLIC
ALASKAN KING CRAB
sudachi, cucumber, LEMON MINT
BIG EYE TUNA
caviar, coconut, PURSLANE
LAMB
red pepper, squash, MÂCHE
BLACK TRUFFLE
prosciutto, porcini, CHIVE BLOSSOM
MIYAZAKI BEEF
watermelon, black sesame, SHISO
MARIONBERRY OR TOKA PLUM
BLUEBERRY
raspberry, croissant, BUBBLEGUM HYSSOP
CHOCOLATE
pistachio, lemon, MINT