The most exciting things to happen to restaurants in Chicago this year didn’t happen in any brick-and-mortar space. Food trucks—along with shared kitchens, underground dinners, and pop-ups—have offered creative entrepreneurs new ways to get their food in people’s faces. Both Matt Maroni (Gaztro-Wagon) and Phillip Foss (Meatyballs Mobile)—two fine-dining chefs kicked out of their kitchens—bounced back, delivering food far more creative than the premade cupcakes and sandwiches other trucks have been pushing. For their pioneering efforts, I’d include them among the “best” restaurants in 2010.
* Yes, we know Big Star and Sprout opened in late 2009, and that’s also when John Manion yanked Branch 27 out of the weeds. But we visited them in 2010, after giving them the customary minimum of a month to iron out the kinks.
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Branch 27 Ronin chef John Manion doesn’t not coddle anybody. When I visited at the start of the year, after he’d been tapped to save this restaurant in the former Eckhart Park public library branch, he was roasting goat legs, compounding butter with bone marrow, and daring diners to look whole grilled sardines in the eye. He offset the funk of those humble fish with a sweet, tart escabeche and peppery arugula. He fried chickens livers hard like Harold’s, but fluffy inside, plating them with garlic aioli and some welcome shrubbery, and prettied up a clovey boudin blanc with shreds of yellow squash and green apple. Among the most extraordinary dishes that have made appearances on his seasonal menus: rabbit leg, braised and shredded with pickled carrots over grilled corn bread, and a light cioppino, sweetly scented with Pernod and fennel and filled with salt cod, sturgeon, mussels, crab, scallops, and head-on shrimp. Manion’s cast-iron Dutch-oven cassoulet—a mainstay—brings together an irresistible meaty quartet of pork belly, duck confit, herbaceous lamb meatballs, and smoky merguez sausage; don’t order it solo. 1371 W. Chicago, 312-850-2700, branch27.com. $$$ —Mike Sula
The Girl & the Goat The second you spin through the revolving doors of Stephanie Izard’s Randolph Row restaurant, you’re blasted with a besotting roasty meatgust issuing from the wood oven at the back of the room. And there in the rear, backlit by kitchen light and open flame, is the Top Chef herself, sweating in front of the exposed line and expediting orders. The menu of rustic, shareable plates, broken down into vegetable, fish, and meat categories, is strongly seasonal, and unorthodox (but not offputting) combinations are Izard’s thing. She’s particularly fond of mammalian garnishes on fish dishes: a hiramasa crudo sprinkled with crispy lardons and drizzled with Peruvian chile aioli was one of the most delicate things I’ve ever put in my mouth. And her efforts with the fifth quarter are truly original. The roasted pig face, slabs of luscious head meat stacked like pancakes with a fried egg on top and potato stix, is notorious, but the less-lauded braised beef tongue with masa, salsa verde, and rough sauteed greens actually deserved more acclaim—like a Vietnamese banh mi, it was a beautiful orchestration of taste, texture, and temperature. 809 W. Randolph, 312-492-6262, girlandthegoat.com. $$$ —Mike Sula
Aesthetic perfection is the point, of course. Executive chef Jason McCleod was schooled in classical French cooking and put in years with the Four Seasons organization and other haute hotels. But just when you think you’ve got him figured for a fussy formalist, one of a battalion of solicitous servers turns up with “Cheese,” a giant wheel of Comté, the smooth, nutty, unpasteurized French cow’s milk cheese. Sawed off into rough wedges and served with buttered caraway toast, it was shockingly rustic, messy and deeply satisfying. 11 E. Walton, 312-880-4400, elysianhotels.com. $$$$$ —Martha Bayne
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