Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A friend summed up the prognosis for this latest celebrity-chef venture in Chicago on Twitter: “Can’t-miss celebrity chefs from the east coast open restaurants in Chicago just to prove to themselves that yes, they can indeed fail.” And indeed, for a cautionary tale Morimoto can simply look out Japonais’s front door at the empty husk of BLT American Brasserie, a fabulously expensive eatery from New York chef Laurent Tourondel that got some of the most scathing reviews in recent Chicago history and closed in six months.
I shot video of Top Chef celebrity chef Fabio Viviani before his Siena Tavern opened in River North, and the question everyone asked me afterward wasn’t “Is he just as adorable in real life as on TV?” (yes, and he knows how to deploy Fabio-ness in person like an Apache helicopter) but “Do you think he’ll actually be there at the restaurant?” I gave the only sensible answer I could—”Hell if I know, but his girlfriend’s from here and he seems to talk Wisconsin cheese pretty knowledgeably, so maybe. The pizza he made on camera was pretty good.” It was taken for granted that the frequency of Fabio’s presence or nonpresence would be the deciding factor in whether it was pretty good or a hack joint for gullible tourists.
