As you probably know, rabbits are running wild all over Chicago right now. If you haven’t seen them, then you must live in a high-rise facing the lake. Summer is the time when rabbits are born and begin their short but happy lives eating, fucking, and sleeping all the time. They’re everywhere. But when the weather gets cold, they’re smart enough to go someplace warm and wait it out.
The first thing that needs to be addressed is the $38 crudite platter, a presentation that seems designed to foment divisiveness. It’s a suitcase-size wooden board covered with a riotous arrangement of vegetables, fruits, flowers, leaves, schmears, cheeses, and flatbreads. Whether you think this a glorious way to enjoy nature’s love for us or an audacious rip-off might depend on precisely when in the season you eat it. I’m somewhere down the middle on the one I munched my way through last month. While the smoked mushroom mousse tasted almost of meat butter smeared on crunchy naan studded with hemp seeds, the ground-up black truffle sprinkled over watery white asparagus performed more like sawdust. Raw cucumber, dill, carrots, garlic scapes, radishes, and convenient spoonlike spears of endive appeared on my board. That Lair was serving excellently ripe and flavorful tomatoes in mid-June indicated they were from someplace far away. (From a Canadian hothouse, in fact.) I bet this spread gets better as the days get shorter. I’d definitely give it another shot, maybe in late July or early August, when our vegetables are at their best.
A short dessert menu features a carrot cake of remarkable density and deep, complex spicing. It’s marred by a disturbing splodge of olive-oil jam with a thickness, viscosity, and opacity shared by certain bodily fluids. I think this otherwise remarkable cake would be improved if served with a simple splash of good, fruity, unmanipulated olive oil. Meanwhile, a banana split proves messy to eat, its large slabs of grilled pineapple resisting pressure from the fork.
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