Vera isn’t going to be one of this year’s glitzy openings. Like the Spanish food and the wines that this Lake Street wine bar plans to offer, it’s straightforward, well-balanced and easy to feel comfortable with. But if there’s nothing exotic to look at in this video tour of the restaurant, we think it captures the easygoing feel and the passion for making people happy with food and drink that radiates from owners Mark and Liz Mendez. They hope to open next week (“We’ll see how friends and family [preview dinners] go, if they’re a disaster, we may hunker down for a few days,” Mark says cheerfully). But even as workmen work on finishing the handsome walnut bar (“I think I was high off the fumes yesterday,” Mark says) and Mark cuts down the menu to manageable length, they’re looking ahead to continued evolution— when Mark found that the oven couldn’t turn out items quickly enough, one of his cooks convinced him to dip his toe, so to speak, into sous vide cooking for the first time. (Still, the most-used piece of equipment in the small kitchen is sure to be the plancha, the flat-top grill.) Get a preview of the space and of the Mendez’s hospitality in our 4-minute video tour below.
