Sometimes it’s hard to say “I love you” because words just aren’t enough. That’s where I am with this review of Parachute, the new Korean, or rather “Korean-American” restaurant in Avondale from husband-and-wife chefs Johnny Clark and Beverly Kim, a Top Cheftestant who appeared on the show during her tenure at Aria. My head still isn’t right after my meals at Parachute, maybe in part because the last time they opened a restaurant together, taking over Logan Square’s Bonsoiree with a 12-course Korean-influenced prix fixe menu, I thoroughly hated it.
Here’s why: On paper Parachute’s $17 dolsot bibimbap looks like an affront. But when you hear it approaching from across the crowded dining room, sizzling like a downed telephone wire in its superheated stone bowl, and it hits the table between you and hopefully someone you like to share food with, and you dig below the raw duck egg and kale dressed in a thin, mildly livery foie gras sauce into the soft rice mined with chunks of tender short rib, and you hit bottom and scrape up the crunchy layer of toasty nurungi, and you start churning the contents until the pickled red Tropea onions settle in among the rapidly cooking greens and eggs and the spicy gochuchang coats the mingled crispy rice and soft rice, and you take a bite of this classic, a rice salad that’s inherently one of the most pleasurably textured and balanced dishes on the planet, you realize you happen to be eating one of the best versions of it outside of a Seoul street market. And it doesn’t stop there.
Kim and Clark don’t seem worried about offending anyone. Across this menu you’ll find assertive, bright, uncompromising flavors. I only came across two dishes that didn’t rise to the level of the others, both of them built around otherwise delicious sea creatures: a fresh kampachi ceviche that got lost among tart green strawberries and fennel, and a delicate olive-oil-poached lemon fish soaking in dashi and buried in smoked wheat berries and a shroud of wet cucumber.
3500 N. Elston 773-654-1460parachuterestaurant.com
