If last year was all about Italian food, this year was all about red meat, with some five major steak houses opening over the past 12 months. Steak houses are sort of like the new Union Stockyards, with a never-ending supply of conventioneers herding into these cow palaces, releasing cash from their expense accounts like bovine emissions. Historically, they’ve been predictable, and I’ve tended to greet the announcement of a new one with dread. But lately I’ve been pleasantly surprised. If five steak houses sounds discouraging, as if our famously progressive eating scene is leaping back toward the cliche the national food media always foists on us—that we’re an unsophisticated cow town—take comfort in the fact that three of these establishments are wholly original takes on the form, and are worth spending some dollars in. (I’ll let you know how Maple & Ash and STK have turned out in the New Year.)
Spain made a strong showing in Wicker Park and the South Loop. The folks behind Pops for Champagne opened Bom Bolla, which comes closer to evoking the spirit of a Barcelona tapas bar than anything in town, with the most varied selection of Spanish booze in the city to wash down “whole red prawns, salted and blazed scarlet; oysters on the half shell roasted in lardo and squirted with bitter charred orange; and thumb-size chorizos fired until they nearly erupt at the touch.” Bom Bolla’s partner and operations manager W. Craig Cooper announced last week that the restaurant would shutter and that its long-term fate is uncertain. “We do hope to address our financial health by the end of the month,” he wrote in a statement published by Eater. “I cannot say at this time if we will be able to reopen in 2016.” The sleeper in the south was Sociale, an unassuming but more expansive Spanish spot with flatbreads and large entrees that included the best pork chop I’ve had in years, and a soft phyllo-encased semolina custard “that won’t allow you to forget a very good restaurant that, at least outwardly, seems to want to be forgotten.”
When Via Lima quietly opened in North Center, it vastly improved the city’s already commendable Peruvian offerings, featuring the bright, brilliant syncretic alloy of Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, African, and indigenous influences. From the acidic ceviches to the starchy, colorful causitas to the beef heart anticuchos, it’s delivering to a “neighborhood overcrowded with middling sports bars and more in need of a dose of rocoto-pepper-spiked novelty than most.”
Honorable mentions:
