- Michael Gebert
- Pecking Order, which closed this weekend
I remember talking with some other food writers, a year and a half ago or so, about one of the pressing questions of the day: where were the flops? Things were opening fast and furiously, often in the form of very large and well-funded restaurants on Randolph Street or in Logan Square, and yet nothing ever seemed to close. Nothing old gave up the ghost, nothing new failed to make it. Sure, you could say that this or that wasn’t catching on as big as was expected, but it was kind of freakish how nothing ever seemed to just flop right out of the gate or just call it a day. Places for food writers to write closed down a lot, but restaurants never did.
The Savoy, the Wicker Park seafood house which closed on Sunday, is a bit more of a puzzle. With top execution, it could have been a significant restaurant at a moment when oyster bars, good cocktail programs, and fresh seafood were all hot. Michelin, for one, gave it pretty high marks with a Bib Gourmand in its first year. But the concept—a seafood and absinthe bar—was the kind of thing that sounds very hip but isn’t really that appealing to more than the small coterie of cocktail enthusiasts. Also, there were hints of internal confusion in the way that chef Brian Greene, a Purple Pig vet, was let go after the first year for another Purple Pig vet, Cecilio Rodriguez. Anyway, if there’s a lesson here maybe it’s that you shouldn’t open anything too upscale in Wicker Park, where the official food and drink remains tacos and beer at the ever-expanding Big Star. High quality and great reviews might’ve made the Savoy a gotta-go destination for the whole city, but falling short of that left it with neither a citywide nor a neighborhood base—sort of like another very good upscale restaurant in the same neighborhood, Storefront Company, which closed at the start of the year.
Anyway, I’m not sure what all this means, except maybe that the “End of History” moment, when you could open anything and the foodies would flock, was brief and ephemeral. The restaurant business is back to being what it always was, which is to say, a tough business with tight margins where the rich usually get richer and the others have to scramble hard but can occasionally, through smarts and lots of asskickingly hard work, pull themselves into those ranks. Bad places close, but good places do too, and a bet on an up-and-coming neighborhood is either the best idea or the worst idea you ever had—and there’s no way to know till you do it.
