My first week in Chicago, in February 1995, I was driving around exploring the city when I turned my girlfriend’s juddery little red Hyundai down Fulton Market between two delivery trucks backed up against opposite-facing loading docks. I was slowly squeezing my way through when around the corner whipped a forklift piloted by a wild-eyed berserker with Lemmy-length hair and a bloodied white work coat who stopped on only the briefest beat before hitting the gas, well aware that I was already putting the car in reverse and getting the fuck out of his way.
City Mouse serves as the anchor for the hotel, and given the principal chefs involved, it was being thought of as a restaurant with extraordinary promise long before it opened its doors. Here you have the team behind the relatively tiny Giant—Jason Vincent and Ben Lustbader—along with chef de cuisine Patrick Sheerin, late of Trenchermen, opening what could almost be described as a satellite operation, serving the same sort of explosively flavored vegetable compositions; luscious, head-slappingly good pastas; and wacky sweet playthings that they made their name on in Logan Square. It’s not for nothing that Giant, on any given night, is home to some of the most hard-to-get tables in town.
When things take a turn toward the meaty, vegetables still have a prime role to play. Hunks of artichoke, battered in Italian bread crumbs and deep-fried, are smothered in meaty pork sugo with drizzles of Taleggio sauce. Skewers of sweet scallop abide with cool cucumbers and crunchy rice-paper crackers.
Twenty-two years ago, when I was a man baby tentatively creeping around the neighborhood, it was unthinkable that a hipster hotel could exist among the whole hog carcasses and dudes who worked with their hands. And yet here we are. Similarly, the food of Vincent, Lustbader, and their cohort of chefs would have been a wondrous dream. Of all the changes this neighborhood has gone through, this is surely one for the better v
311 N. Morgan 312-764-1908citymousechicago.com
