A composed plate featuring two rows of four perfectly aligned nachos shows up on the menu of Gemini, the second act for a long-running Lincoln Park neighborhood restaurant. Each of those well-behaved chips is piled with successively diminishing gobs of garnish, beginning with juicy duck confit, followed by a tiny, perfect square of melted chihuahua cheese, then a wee spread of avocado pico de gallo, a dribble of lime-infused crema, and a thin sliver of bright red chile. It’s a composition so uptight and precious I thought I’d entered a time warp back to 2009. That was the year Jason Paskewitz opened the kitchen at Gemini Bistro. On his menu was “a basket of greasy tortilla chips dus ted with dry, gamy, stringy duck and sprinkled sparsely with mango salsa and queso fresco,” wrote Martha Bayne, eating for the Reader.
For the most part these standards are reliably well executed. The New York strip, glistening with marrow butter, languishes in a sweet port wine sauce. The half roasted chicken is crisp, juicy, and positively birdlike in flavor, the kitchen avoiding the common modern miscalculation of sending out overbrined pastrami-like poultry. If the salmon is slightly overdone atop its bed of brussels-sprout leaves and candied bacon, then the burger—cooked to a default medium odd for such a thick patty—at least goes down in a wet and sloppy tide of aioli, Monterey Jack, and lettuce. But it’s nothing your average Lincoln Park soccer mom and her middle-management husband can’t handle.
And yet Gemini Bistro has attained what every restaurateur fervently desires: the enduring patronage of a large group of neighborhood regulars. The new Gemini likely won’t run many of those off. For the rest of us? Move along. Nothing to see here. v
2075 N. Lincoln 773-525-2522geminichicago.com
