Like Elizabeth, and the late, great Bunny, the Microbakery, Kitsune is a wee Regan joint of singularly enjoyable weirdness. Even though the studied and occasionally menacing woodland twee is dialed back, it’s still lurking in the shadows waiting for the right moment to surprise you. A mural depicting the restaurant’s namesake magical fox twines around the restroom walls, while smaller, three-dimensional representations of said canid—a seductive shape-shifter in Japanese folklore—dispense soy sauce at the table. Tiny ceramic rabbits hold your chopsticks as President Obama, who now seems a distant character from one of our own fairy tales, benignly smiles down from a framed portrait hanging above the bar.
Kitsune
There’s not much else to distract from the real heart of Regan’s project—an exploration of the intersection of Japanese culinary technique and kitchen canon, with midwestern ingredients and guided by her own idiosyncratic sensibility.
Regan addresses the mass ramen obsession with typical fearlessness, producing two bowls—tonkotsu and vegan—of arrestingly gothic appearance, the latter built on a scorched miso broth, with black, house-made chitarra-like noodles kneaded with ash produced from the restaurant’s leftover vegetable scraps. It’s a deeply flavorful bowl that would stand out on any other menu but somehow pales in comparison to the tonkotsu, infused before straining with charred aromatics such as leeks, ginger, garlic, and scallions, resulting in a kind of caramelized pork demi-glace thick enough to coat your spoon, along with molten egg, charred pork belly, chile paste, and leek oil.
4229 N. Lincolnkitsunerestaurant.com
