During the preopening hype for Sunda, the new pan-Asian—excuse me, “New Asian”—preening ground from Billy Dec’s Rockit Ranch Productions, the company issued a full color vacation album of the Party Baron’s Big Adventure in Asia, featuring him nibbling scorpion sticks and chillaxin’ on the Great Wall with best bud Ross Geller. Dec evidently fancies himself Bourdain in a ballcap, or perhaps something even more iconic: the restaurant’s YouTube commercial frames him Christlike, backlit and with the whole world in his hands.
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Raw fish seemed fresh enough and stood on its own merits even when up against seemingly insurmountable overmanipulation. In the Wa-Machi, a specialty hamachi roll, the fish was surprisingly present and accounted for amid the triple attack of fresh wasabi, wasabi tobiko, and wasabi aioli. Same went for the escolar nigiri garnished with potato chips and mild truffle shavings (was it that Chinese fungi?). But some combinations were just plain wrongheaded—an amuse of noodles and ground beef, almost like Bolognese, was the antithesis of something intended to wake the palate. A so-called salad of soft “burnt” watermelon and jerkylike unagi bacon was a total textural mismatch, and the braised oxtail pot stickers in a “white wasabi cream” gave the lie to Dec’s claim that there’s no fusion in this joint. The impressive-looking crispy pata, a towering confit pork shank, could’ve been a nod to the deep-fried lechon kawali of Aglibot’s Filipino heritage but for the side of foie gras “gravy,” which tasted like liver boiled in sriracha.
Aglibot’s ostentatiousness did finally pay off in a dessert, appropriately named Ridiculous: a squat dome of walnut-studded caramel covering a ball of vanilla ice cream, insulated by a gingery layer of carrot cake. —Mike Sula
Back in 2006, when Mundial Cocina Mestiza opened in Pilsen, I and many others made much ado over the improbability of fine dining thriving amid the taquerias of 18th Street. Well, that was nothing. Mundial’s husband-and-wife team, Katie and Eusebio Garcia, have since split up, and while Mundial is being revamped by former partner Mario Cota and new chef Hector Marcial, Eusebio is floating a way more improbable proposition: fine dining fillips in Back of the Yards.
110 W. Illinois, 312-644-0500
737 N. LaSalle, 312-664-4800
4559 S. Halsted, 773-538-8200
