Of the many disguises I wear to work, my favorite is the disoriented foreign tourist: I walk into a new restaurant clutching the Lonely Planet Chicago and in a vaguely eastern European accent ask if they serve “the deep dish.” Most hosts are sympathetic when telling me no, and I allow myself to be talked into a table or a seat at the bar to hear the highlights of the menu. If they laugh at me that says a lot too.
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Listing your farmers on your menu doesn’t set you apart these days. And what exactly is “modern cuisine” anyway? On Moscatello’s menu, the dish listed way down at the end of the menu is titled “The Whole Hog.” It’s a tasting of four two-bite preparations, beginning at far left with a piece of liver crusted in corn flakes and fried to bitter rubber, followed by two perfect squares of silky loin posed on a slice of Japanese eggplant, then a finger of breakfast sausage, and finally a crepe folded around some shredded rib meat and unidentifiable offal. It’s an inharmonious set of hors d’oeuvres at $28 that probably belongs on the menu’s first section of shareable bites, and it says just as little about this chef’s “modern farm cooking cuisine” as anything else.
Among these starters are foie gras bombes that crown sweet, caramelized onions and luscious ribbons of cured salmon on smudges of sweet fennel jam, each perched atop some dry, seemingly stale brioche circles. They’re tasty canapes for sure—the sort of thing chefs put out at charity events as calling cards. You pluck them from small paper plates, pop them in your mouth, and quickly forget them when you move onto the next station.
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