If you’re not adept at Pinyin, one of the fun things you can do at Tony Hu’s Lao You Ju is spend a few minutes dreaming about what “Healthy Stuffed Corn Bons” could be. I asked a few times, but I never got a clear answer, and the kitchen in the back of this hallucinogenically overdecorated lounge was never able to produce them anyway.
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Instead, he’s created a Weird World of Hu, a dream chamber governed by a mystifying concept identified on the menu as “NeoChinesism.” As far as I can tell, that’s some kind of merging of the modern with the traditional, an inclusive philosophy with room for both straight jazz-vocal covers of Culture Club, Prince, and Clash songs and a glow-in-the-dark bar stocked with $3,000 bottles of 30-year-old rice whiskey.
It’s also not strictly the small-plates joint it’s hyped as. There are plenty of straightforward family-size regional dishes like sizzling, incendiary Lamb With Cumin, sweet-and-spicy fried Three-Chili Fish, and Numbing Spicy Fish Chongqing Style, laden with pickled cabbage. These won’t be unfamiliar to fans of Lao Sze Chuan.
Lao You Ju 2002 S. Wentworth 312-225-7818
