There are two types of people in this world: those who will descend the long black steps below 111 W. Kinzie and feel as if they’ve stepped into the Cotton Club, and those who, upon making that descent, will slowly realize to their dismay that they’ve stepped into a bottomless pit.
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Despite Untitled’s silly pretensions toward secrecy—there’s no sign advertising its awkward name except for the one touting valet service—I felt I could like this cavernous “speakeasy” with its imposing black doors, multiple dining rooms and bars, curtained booths, back patio, “secret” entrance, “whiskey library,” and performance spaces hosting jazz and burlesque acts. Its scope and ambition are impressive, and everyone gets into the act, from the leggy hostesses in little black dresses and stilettos to the suspendered servers to the purposeful floor managers in tam-o’- shanters yapping urgently into their headsets. While the Prohibition shtick seems laughably clumsy in some ways—a speakeasy with a jumbo-size screening of a Cubs game?—it is remarkably polished in others. It feels, at first, like a living, breathing entity, charged with the sort of energy that might impart a shared sense of celebration among hundreds of strangers.
Summer fruits—pickled, conserved, and reduced into sauces—appear all over an otherwise meaty assortment of dishes, brightening familiar proteins. It almost makes you feel virtuous eating slices of pinkish pork chop dressed with pickled plums and bitter dandelion greens; or goat-stuffed dumplings lightened by blackberry barbecue sauce; or cubes of fatty braised pork belly with sour rhubarb mostarda, zucchini, and turnip puree; or seared squab breast slices arrayed atop a pastry pocket of mushroom duxelles, sauced with blueberry conserves.
111 W. Kinzie 312-880-1511untitledchicago.com
