Having eaten at both an unknown kaiseki
masterpiece and an unknown pretty damn good
burger on the far south side in the last week, I felt the need last night to eat somewhere
known, to have my dinner selection validated by Chicago magazine's list of the 20 Top Restaurants That Everyone's Dishing Are Hipper Than New York's. The name Scylla stuck in my head as an example of the sort of place I wanted to eat, and more to the point, be seen eating at.
Thus began a two hour process in which my putative dining companions threw out driving down to Petey's, driving up to Bob Chinn's, going to Katsu, having Mexican at Don Juan's, going to Myron and Phil's for the burger, having Italian at some damn place, going to Katsu, going to Hackney's for a burger, making hamburgers on the grill, having hamburgers from Wendy's, going to Katsu, and finally we settled on Think. Which, of course, was closed for the weekend, being the one-man operation that it is, so a quick course correction had us meeting a few blocks away at Le Bouchon. Which was closed on Sunday. But next door, possibly drawing the "Hey, looks like Le Bouchon is closed on Sunday" crowd, was a fairly well packed Scylla. And so we went there, couldn't have been easier picking a place.
The rooms, up and down, are definitely more stylish than they were in Glory days, the highlight upstairs being a series of Tim Burtonish paintings of bigeyed spectral sirens-- the more Goth morbidness enters the mainstream, I'm just waiting for a restaurant to finally go all the way and have black walls and Suicide Girls for waitstaff, etc. (Now
that would make the Top 20 Hipper Than New York List.)
The plus side was the food, in fact the chef may be a graduate of Spring but I liked almost everything quite a bit better than almost anything in my
one, rather wan visit there. (Though it took an inordinately long time to decide because I've found that I almost can't read lengthy menu descriptions of this kind any more. My eyes glaze over with the glazes.)
We had three appetizers, onion tart was fine but the least of them, a salmon tartar/salmon mousse was quite nice, the grilled baby octopus salad, in addition to the writhing tentacles somehow fitting the decor, was really, as the title of this thread puts it, a WOW, perfectly grilled and not at all
fatty (if in fact that's possible for an octopus, which I doubt), tart dressing, salty peccorino and bits of salted watermelon under it that worked perfectly. We were all pretty much blown away by that, though not so much that our snarkiness about the menu went away:
In a PM G Wiv wrote:Grilled baby octopus w/watermelon balsamic glazed watermelon/shaved red onion/fresh mint/pecorino cheese was good, but needed a few more 'cool/hip' ingredients. Maybe they could borrow mission figs or basil gelee from another dish.
Well, it was more than good, it was damned good. Entrees were generally quite good, too. G Wiv had a monkfish and sweetbread combo in which the crisp-edged sweetbreads were the particular standout, Ms Wiv had duck breast and confit (breast slightly done past where it probably ought to be, but not fatally so), and I had what was alleged to be Tasmanian Ocean Trout (but looked and tasted a hell of a lot like salmon-- and this was
after we'd annoyed the waiter by asking how we could be sure the trout was from Tasmania and not New Hebrides or Ascension Island), on top of wild mushrooms and gnocchi in a, yes, I actually ordered this, lemon chocolate sauce. Chocolate and fish? Wild mushrooms and chocolate? Gnoccholate? Didn't really work, as you probably could have guessed, though it was possible to enjoy the fish (whatever it was) on its protective layer of gnocchi without making a hot fish sundae out of it.
Last up, desserts. And contrary to the earlier comment, I think we all agreed that the desserts were, if anything, the high point of the meal. G Wiv had an ice cream tasting but I think we all agreed that the ice creams on the side of the other desserts were more interesting-- my lemon verbena creme brulee was outshone by a basil ice cream (something I last had at Trio in its heyday), and Ms Wiv's chocolate panna cotta came with an ice cream studded with salted peanut pieces that was a real nice taste/texture/salty/sweet bundle o' sensations.
Now, the downside. Service was... like this was on the Hippest 20 Places That New York Doesn't Have list or something. When we checked in, hey the place was hopping but not
that busy, but you'd have thought they were planning an amphibious deployment in New Orleans by the hustling about and looks of concern as they kept consulting the board for five minutes before finally seating us at one of five empty tables upstairs. I like an unstressed, gracious greeting, not one that makes me feel like I'm checking in late at O'Hare on Random Cavity Search Training Day. And the waiter, well, okay, somebody at our table was wishing he was at Petey's Bungalow and we may not have given off the best vibe, so I'll ignore some customer-waiter tension early on, but let's just point out that they lost at least two drink sales that evening by 1) whisking away a cocktail glass without asking if said drinker wanted another and 2) whisking away the wine list and himself after taking one person's wine glass order and not seeing if the person next to her, peering over her shoulder trying to read tiny type in dim light, might possibly want one too. Pretentious but not polished, that's the service you get too often in these 20 Restaurants Too Hip For You To Have Heard Of Us type places, and we basically did at Scylla.