Hold your nose and high-five Embeya’s Thai Dang for offering durian, the world’s stinkiest fruit. If you skipped ahead and looked at that single item on the dessert menu, you might expect this polished project from the L2O vet and his partner, Attila Gyulai, to be full of risks and rewards. The custardy tropical fruit that emits the seductive scent of banana, pineapple, and rotting flesh is the ultimate test of the human will to endure suffering in the pursuit of the Delicious. Presenting it with sweet, coconut-infused sticky rice signifies a chef confident in his vision—and a sign he won’t mollycoddle diners with the safe and familiar.
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Dang and Gyulai met at the Elysian, where the latter was the hotel’s director of operations and the former the chef de cuisine at its fine dining spot Ria (after leaving L2O). Together, they’ve built out a cavernous but sleek, darkly comfortable space inhabited by a menu that’s vaguely Asian but more Vietnamese than anything else. Dang gussies up more than a few iconic dishes from the homeland: spring rolls, papaya salad tossed with beef jerky, sausage-stuffed squid, and a handful of preparations identical to, if not inspired by, the homey, braised, caramel dishes known as kho.
One of Dang’s signature dishes—and what servers will likely tell you is his most popular—is a roulade of air-dried roasted chicken, deboned and rolled up on itself, and served with a dead-simple sort of chimichurri of oil, scallions, and ginger. It looks like a complicated dish, but it’s one of many rooted in classic techniques (Eastern and Western), much like the arresting-looking stuffed squid sections packed with forcemeat, which is a familiar Vietnamese surf-and-turf sausage.
564 W. Randolph 312-612-5640embeya.com
