It’s difficult to imagine a dish more universally Latin American than arroz con pollo. Everyone eats it, but it’s different everywhere you go. It’s cooked with achiote in Puerto Rico. They add ketchup in Nicaragua. In Peru it’s dark beer. But even with all the variations from country to country, one thing unites them all: the pollo is always cooked in the arroz. The reason for that is elementary. You give that rice to the chicken, and the chicken gives back to the rice.
Ronero inhabits a long, dim art-deco-inspired series of dining room/bar/dining room in a space that last housed a business that wasn’t a restaurant, an increasingly endangered species in this neighborhood. The upstairs bar and party space, judging from photos on Instagram, seems more populated by leggy ladies and dudebro sausagefests than anything on Morris’s menu.
The restaurant’s disciplined adherence to the rote protein-side-sauce approach at least is filtered through Morris’s South American sensibility. So the hamburguesa sports a chorizo marmalade, and the lamb chops try to keep it real with a Peruvian purple potato hash and a sauce made from the minty Andean herb huacatay. The pork belly is arrayed in glistening, crispy mouthfuls across a hummuslike white bean puree with thinly sliced mangoes duking it out with charred brussels sprouts.
A “ronero” is a master rum distiller, in case you’ve forgotten this is a rum bar. Beverage director Allie Kim (formerly of Boka) has assembled an awe-inspiring collection of more than a hundred sugarcane spirits, some of which are employed in house cocktails, classics, highballs, and postprandial drams to make sure the goat goes down easy.
738 W. Randolph 312-600-6105ronerochicago.com
