Order the saganaki wings at Travelle, the restaurant in the Langham hotel, and you’ll be treated to a display that will evoke, depending on your mood, either a grease fire or Greektown’s stock expression of celebration.
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Still, it’s one of a few moments at the Mediterranean-inspired restaurant from former Tru and Paris Club chef Tim Graham that reveals an intent to break from the staid predictability on which hotel restaurants all too often depend. You can find another example on the cocktail list, where the $17 “Madhattan” is garnished with a skewered foie gras-stuffed cherry, a move arguably more reckless than playing with fire on a bare wooden table. My little blob of mousse escaped into the cocktail the instant I disturbed it.
This is fine dining with options to go lower. Eat with your hands all night with a $135 seafood elevation, then mussels and frites, and finally a crispy merguez sausage and olive flatbread. Or obstinately stick with your utensils with a delicate yet aggressively piney and funky-tasting snapper and anchovy crudo, and great boulders of gamy, fried confit suckling pig nestled among slabs of squash and fig.
The pursuit of variety all too often comes at the expense of focus in many restaurants, but it’s a particular challenge in hotel dining rooms, which have to satisfy all sorts of incompatible tastes and appetites. Travelle at least shows consistency by sticking to one region. But the Mediterranean is too deep and wide to sustain it.
330 N. Wabash 312-923-7705travellechicago.com
