When One Sixtyblue opened on Randolph Street lo these many years ago, it brought an understated American elegance to a neighborhood mainly known for a large adult bookstore. (Seriously, that was enough of a landmark that it actually appeared in the driving directions for one dotcom job we had in the area.) Now it is many years later, and everyone is opening something on Randolph Street, and so we don’t know exactly what it means that One Sixtyblue is becoming an upscale Asian barbecue place, except maybe that Randolph Street has nothing to prove to diners any more and has room for one of anything… as long as there’s a name chef involved. And that there is: Belly Q, as the name might suggest, the latest and undoubtedly largest venture from Bill Kim and his wife Yvonne Cadiz-Kim, of Urban Belly and Belly Shack and, before that, of Charlie Trotter’s right-hand-man fame.
What will it be like? The menu is still being refined, we are told, so how much it will resemble anything else (Urban Belly, all those izakayas, Smoque) is still up in the air. The interior will be “made largely from materials chose for their overlooked beauty,” which we take to mean that the skateboarder/urban grit atmosphere of Belly Shack will be writ larger and grander in some fashion. It will open in spring, which is vague enough to say somewhere between April and October, most likely. Besides Bill Kim, the other names involved are, as with One Sixtyblue, Michael Jordan and Cornerstone Group. You will undoubtedly hear more about this as it adds yet another starry coming-soon to the Randolph Street lineup.
