We continue to amuse ourselves, if not necessarily anyone else, with the possibilities presented by Untitled, the secret place with no name and no address which may have opened last weekend, and will soon be packed with thousands of people secretly attending it and streaming out drunkenly (but secretly) all over Kinzie Street. As part of this top secret opening, yesterday brought us no fewer than two slideshows of the absolutely classified, cannot-confirm-or-deny-its-existence interior, at Eater and Time Out Chicago. So if you ever figure out its location (which has a lot of ones in it, and is along the same Melman Bro’s row that will shortly include the Country-Tiki place and who knows what all), here’s what you’ll enjoy in what TOC calls its “Nellcote x 10” atmosphere (you know what we call a place that serves pizza and is ten times as big as Nellcote? O’Hare).
With its 18-foot ceilings, leather-walled “whiskey library” with private lockers, and other luxe accoutrements that make one doubt the existence of an economic downturn, it’s like a perfect encapsulation of everything that’s oh-sohot at the moment— Nellcote’s size and luxeness, The Office’s taste in paintings, The Public Hotel’s affectless übertrendichkeit, The Bedford’s blurring of the line between pickup bar and bank vault. As one local foodie tweeted, “It appears that this is the 1st restaurant designed specifically for Time Out Chicago.”
Our undoubtedly embittered, hate-seething bloggerish snark aside, these guys (like the Melman Bro’s) are serious about paying for top talent, which is what keeps these River North places from just being suburb-ready concepts; Matthew “Choo” Lipsky, last seen at the quietly-closed Morso, is running the cocktail program, and while we don’t know chef Joe Heppe, the menu, for all that it hits oh-so-2012 notes (“goat wonton”), sure isn’t feeding the swarming (secretly) masses the same old stuff when the “small plates” are things like squash blossoms and salt baked baby beets.
Oh, and one thing that was genuinely, unexpectedly cool: they got vintage jazz guy Milt Trenier, who way back when was in The Girl Can’t Help It with Jayne Mansfield and Little Richard, to play at their opening party Saturday night. So go look at the top-secret slideshows, then we have to kill you. [Eater/TOC]
