It’s a little-known fact that the Secret Order of Posturing Publicans requires pledge-member establishments to staff up with a minimum 65 percent of scruffy beardos, each outfitted with a tweed scally cap, before they can be awarded their ampersands. Opening well ahead of Wicker Park’s Bangers & Lace and Lakeview’s Blokes & Birds, Logan Square’s Owen & Engine was assured its pick of the hirsute chaps passed over by Longman & Eagle.
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Chef de cuisine Charles Burkhardt’s light, greaseless batter-fried haddock and chubby chips are pretty good, and the structurally unstable rasher-and-egg sandwich—thin crispy collops of English back bacon, aligned on a long ciabatta swiped with mayo and topped with a fried egg—is worth painting your face with. But the most delicious thing on his menu is the item least likely to appear within the confines of a British pub. That would be sous chef Jacob Bickelhaupt’s so-called rustic lasagna: dollops of rabbit confit layered between large irregular sheets of pasta drizzled with a fennel-infused orange-zest-ricotta sauce. A server (beard, check; cap, check) proudly described the pasta as to me as “hand torn,” presumably to let me know the place would never employ one of those awful steam-powered pasta tearers.
The presence of this shockingly delicious anomaly—on a menu that boasts bubble and squeak, a charcuterie plate of sausages, paté, and pork belly rillettes arrayed on a tree trunk, and an open-faced mutton-and-rutabaga meat pie with a crust thicker and drier than a powdered wig—makes me wonder what else the staff can do that might surprise Charles Dickens. But after almost two months in action, inconsistencies in execution still dog the kitchen: half-cooked Indian-style lentils with a rack of lamb, vegetables pickled with too much sugar.
Those drinks, devised by Daniel D’Oliveira (formerly of Boka and Mercadito) and mixed predominantly with craft spirits from the Great Lakes region, weigh in on the sweet end of the scale, but a handful of nicely balanced potions—like the Italian Hurricane, made with Campari, mezcal, and Adam Seger’s herbal Hum spirit, or the Shake in the Hay, gin and Chartreuse with a bracing dose of celery bitters—stand out. Bartenders are well capable of going off list and mixing perfectly good adult classics like a boozy Sazerac or properly bitter Negroni.
The restaurant’s on the river, at the epicenter of serious expense-account dining territory, and views out the dining room windows are equaled only by the spectacle inside, where there’s some of the best beautiful-people watching in town. In the back of the house is all the infrastructure you need to prepare a perfect steak: a dry-aging room, in-house butchers, and Southbend infrared broilers, which blast their prime aged meat with 1,800-degree waves from all directions.
Chicago Cut Steakhouse 300 N. LaSalle, 312-329-1800chicagocutsteakhouse.com
Watershed 601 N. State, 312-266-4932watershedbar.com
