Editor’s note: Oon closed in December 2013.
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With my first bite at Oon, Eversman’s year-and-a-half-in-the-making Randolph Street restaurant, I was relieved. It was a blackened grilled prawn, its shell painted with the muted heat of a Japanese spice blend, resting across some squirts of smoky grilled scallion puree, dabs of creamy liquid lemon, and coins of candied kumquat, all strewn with strands of lightly wilted baby mustard greens. It’s so delicious it demands that the eater suck every last trace of flavor from the crustacean’s head. Eversman evidently gets excited to see that. He rushed over to our table and congratulated us on our carapace slurping and mentioned that this was one of his proudest dishes. It’s a perfect balance of sweet sea creature, acidic fruit, and vegetal smokiness, and it’s every bit as good as the octopus: sweetly glazed and grilled tangles of tentacle coiled among mounds of nutty wheat berries, nuggets of battered and deep-fried Mexican chorizo, and dollops of vinegary smoked strawberry puree.
The foie pho is brought to the table as a dry bowl filled with a modest amount of bean sprouts, thin slices of raw duck breast, unusually ruddy rice noodles, and a single small slab of seared duck liver. Poured over this is a clean, clear, intensely ducky broth that cooks the meat and releases the aroma from a few leaves of Thai basil. It’s a delicate dish, served with such reverence that it might have come from a completely different world than the one that produced the hearty bowls served in the myriad pho-stablishments on Argyle Street, or even the ones the chef was preparing at Saigon Sisters. Similar in its formality, a small bowl of thick, irregular, and perhaps slightly undercooked cold udon noodles—twined among sweet crab, mushrooms, mint, and scallions—is showered with a chile-lime vinaigrette that mingles at the bottom with a light dashi. These aren’t street food knockoffs anymore, or at least you won’t recognize the ones that are.
Among other recent pan-Asian openings like Embeya, Kabocha, and Vu Sua, Eversman’s Oon is the ballsiest. It isn’t as nervy as Saigon Sisters, but it shows a strength and maturity that perhaps restrains some of the fearlessness I think I’m missing. I guess everyone grows up.
802 W. Randolph 312-929-2555oonrestaurant.com
