Sooo, it’s been a long, hard week, and you want to go out and be treated like a dead movie star.
The chef initially was Ross Mendoza, who came from Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s restaurant group, most recently at the late Pump Room, the storied boite in the former Ambassador East—a place that in its prime was somewhere that movie stars and aging idols actually would hang out. Maybe Mendoza picked up some of that long-gone mojo. Who can say, as he departed the project in its early days? His chef de cuisine, Johnny Besch (Bistro Bordeaux, L2O), stepped up, updating and adding to the menu, which on its face looks like a dozen others in the West Loop and River North. You have your seafood tower and caviar service. You have your avocado toast because, while that may not have been a thing 65 years ago, it is a thing now. You have your shishito peppers, because people still like to eat with their paws. There are roasted carrots, naturally. Whole roasted fish, oysters, and a 22-ounce rib eye for two or four or, if you’re the Big Man, one. And of course—everybody say it with me now—there’s a burger.
The burger you’ve met dozens of times before: a thin double-pattied diner style, cooked well beyond pink but buried under so much cheese and sickly-sweet pickles you likely won’t notice. A “minute steak”—what the devious menu writer meant by hanger steak—is gristly and a chore to eat, even among roasted baby potatoes, chimichurri, and blackened green onions.
817 W. Lake 312-526-3116blvdchicago.com
