Gustavus Franklin Swift was the Chicago meat-packer who coined the phrase “everything but the squeal” to describe how efficient his slaughterhouses were at turning whole live animals into meat, soap, fertilizer, glue, and oleomargarine. Swift was also the guy who figured out how to ship butchered cows in refrigerated railcars, and is thus largely responsible for turning us into a nation enslaved to cheap meat.
The brassy, wood-paneled, multitiered curvilinear space features multiple dining rooms, a subordinate “Tavern” (aka the bar) with its own abbreviated menu, an embedded adjunct seafood-focused restaurant called Cold Storage, and a working concierge desk to help you score theater tickets, or maybe tell you where to get a good steak. Exposed concrete support columns, clocks set to Central Standard Time in various midwestern cow towns, and scarlet hardcover volumes on shelves are supposedly meant to evoke ol’ Gus’s imagined office.
I wish I could summon the same enthusiasm for a seafood entree I forced myself to order; an overcooked striped bass fillet was a reminder that this is a massive operation still getting steady on its feet. On the other hand a roast half chicken, another baseline barometer of kitchen competency, was a paragon of the form, its brittle, delicate skin armoring lush, juicy poultry flesh. At $29 it’s a dollar cheaper than the least expensive steak on the menu, and so elementally good that on a return visit I might consider passing on the beef.
Who knows if Gustavus Swift would’ve felt at home in this gleaming, expansive meat locker, but the Boka group and B. Hospitality have reimagined the steak house as something at once fundamental and original. v
1000 W. Fulton Market 312-733-9420swiftandsonschicago.com
