If a homesick Italian tourist wandered off Michigan Avenue into Acanto, the latest among many new restaurants to call themselves Italian over the last year or so, he wouldn’t be much comforted. Yes, there’s pizza and pasta, polenta and salumi, grappa and panna cotta, and a wine list that goes up and down the Boot. But Acanto, which replaced the elegant French Henri, is more or less nominally “Italian,” breaking a number of cardinal rules with its large portions, complicated dishes with too many ingredients, salad the appetizer rather than salad the late-course digestive aid, and—che porca miseria!—meat and vegetables sharing plate space.
If you’re proceeding from pasta, second courses might present a challenge to your endurance. Bronzed, fat-slicked suckling pig presented three ways—a luscious chop, a quivering slab of porchetta, and a pan-seared slice of house-made Spam—is arrayed over a landscape of black beans, mushrooms, and tomatoes. Boulders of tender veal Parmigiano rest on a floor of beech and hen of the wood mushrooms, capers, and cured tomatoes, while a thick cut of delicately seared alabaster swordfish takes a dip in a mildly spicy nduja brodo among sliced fennel and chickpeas. A roasted half chicken bathes in sweet marsala- spiked sauce with chanterelles, eggplant, and cauliflower.
Disclosure: On one occasion I dined with an acquaintance of spirits director Mike Page, who sent out several dishes on the house.
18 S. Michigan 312-578-0763 acantochicago.com
