Oh Restaurant Week, what a complex and confusing animal you are. Here is the basic haps: From February 20-27, a hefty selection of Chicago restaurants will be offering 3-course lunches and dinners for $22 and $32 respectively. The complete list of participating restaurants is here, but our favorite choices include:
• C-House, offering a $32 dinner with your choice of a mixed greens salad with sheep’s milk cheese and pistachios or butternut squash soup, an entree choice of fish & chips, salmon with parsley and parsnip, or roasted chicken with winter vegetables and dumplings. Yumsters.
• It’s dinner only at one sixtyblue, but for $32 the chance to check out three courses from newbie chef Michael McDonald is a sweet deal. We’re sold on the pheasant confit that garnishes the chicken breast entree, and sticky toffee date cake is our kind of dessert. Menu here.
•One of the best deals is the lunch at David Burke’s Primehouse. Your three-courser includes apps like kobe beef sashimi or surf & turf dumplings (a duo of short ribs and lobster lemon), and entrees run the standard protein gamut — chicken, salmon — with a couple of different steak choices and the kick-ass 40-day dry aged steakburger. They’re also offering dinner, but the extra ten bucks is so not worth it — the menus are nearly identical — the only difference is that at dinner there are the added entree choices of a bone-in filet mignon or David Burke’s signature “Angry Lobster” (which we’ve had, and which we can assuredly say is not worth it). Lunch menu here. Dinner menu here.
• There’s a perfect light lunch at Cafe Spiaggia: you’ll get a starter of potato-leek soup, an entree of hand-crafted cappellacci (that’s a tortelloni-esque pasta filled with butternut squash), and your choice of gelati and sorbeti to close.
• For a taste of Bayless, Frontera Grill has a lunch menu of sopa Azteca, tacos al carbon, and a chocolate pecan pie bar. Meanwhile, over at Topolobampo, the same $22 buys you
(presumably the same) sopa Azteca, and your choice of pork loin in mole poblano or vegetable enchilada with roasted tomatillo sauce, plus dessert of a crepa with ice cream and cajeta. Menus here.
• One of the sweetest deals is at Texas de Brazil, where their entire million-billion-item salad bar and unlimited meat lunch — normally $34 — is ratcheted down 35% to the restaurant week standard of $22.
Be sure to make reservations — or at least call ahead — because these seats will fill up fast.
Chicago Restaurant Week [Official Site]
[Photo via C-House’s official site]
