Certain restaurants and restaurant groups are known kitchen incubators. Trotter’s. Alinea and company. Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises. They’ve all nurtured legions of cooks and then let them spread out, like seeds cast into the wind, and grow into chefs.
Still, the predominance of most of these starters underscores the truth in Bar Marta’s name: this is good drinking food, truly communal, with the exception of a handful of salads. It begins with a dish of olives and spicy-sour dill pickles, starkly different from the treacly preserved vegetable candy most restaurants traffic in these days. Lengths of meaty charred eggplant seasoned with smoky paprika and tarted up with sumac are cooled down with Greek yogurt, tahini, and buttermilk, and accompanied by thick pepita-and-sesame-studded crackers. Chicken liver paté enriched with sherry is smeared thickly on hunks of grilled bread and speared with shards of crispy lacquered chicken skin. The mineral gaminess and textural oleaginousness of lamb tartare and its accompanying protein-rich raw egg yolk is cut with chopped almonds, caper leaves, and potent harissa aioli.
Among four desserts a hazelnut chocolate tart with Nutella ganache provided a dense, rich footnote to a relatively light meal of shared appetizers and drinks from the list of rigorously orthodox classic cocktails, while a lighter and more cheffy banana-rum cake draped in glassy caramel was an appropriate ending to a visit that consisted largely of entrees and bottles of dry cava.
2700 W. Chicago 773-697-4489barmarta.com/
