Custom House Tavern, an upscale restaurant which has had a seven-year run in the Hotel Blake on south Dearborn, announced today that it would close after service on Wednesday night. Originally launched by owners Peter and Sue Kim-Drohomyrecky with chef Shawn McClain (Spring, Green Zebra), Custom House was, if not one of the most acclaimed and talked about restaurants on the downtown scene, certainly a generally respected one. After McClain left the partnership, they eventually settled on Chef Perry Hendrix in 2010; in a 2011 review David Tamarkin called Hendrix’s incarnation of Custom House “one of the city’s best-kept secrets,” which is the kind of praise a restaurant isn’t entirely happy about qualifying for.
In the last year Hendrix and the Drohomyreckys opened Maison and Eggy’s Diner near Streeterville, and it sounds as if the writing has been on the wall in their relationship with the Hotel Blake, which has now led to this abrupt closing. A release from the Drohomyreckys pledged new things at their new restaurants: “We will be looking to update our menus at both Maison and Eggy’s— and present our guests with additional creative fare. We will be hosting several events this winter at both locations, including a satellite dinner at Maison for Baconfest. We hope to be adding dinner back to Eggy’s line up with a newly-minted Blue Plate Special-focused menu in a few weeks.”
