I approached Entente, a new “casual fine dining” restaurant from Arami owner Ty Fujimura, with a bit of trepidation. With a website featuring little more than an inscrutable, cursory menu, a reservation system that requires a credit card number, and $20-per-person penalty for no-shows, I worried it had a touch of the user-unfriendliness you might encounter trying to get a table at, say, Schwa. And that’s not just because Fujimura’s chef is Brian Fisher, a four-year veteran of that closet-size crucible of fuck-you fine dining. As my pals and I claimed our credit-secured four-top we looked around a restaurant empty but for a table occupied by Fujimura and his pals, laughing it up.
But first two salads upend the usual expectations for greenery of their kind. The “wedge” is a circular segment of iceberg more properly described as a bowl, its center filled with a deposit of cool, creamy green goddess dressing and its perimeter adorned with bacon, pungent Cambozola cheese, and dollops of concentrated tomato jam. The raw greens in the kale salad are tenderized with a sweet, sour, and spicy Thai-style vinaigrette to mitigate the joyless mastication usually required by them, tossed with crunchy tempura-fried ramen noodles, and mounted on a sheaf of grilled napa cabbage.
Angie Silberberg’s list of 40-some wines is devoted to minimally messed-with natural bottles, more than a dozen local beers, and cocktails such as Patty’s Revenge, a sweet rummy concoction in a highball glass with a blast of bracing Branca Menta, or the What Are We Doing, with a bourbon base sent in a surprisingly effective tiki direction from tropical-flavored Red Bull. And don’t sleep on the nonalcoholic house-made sodas with intriguing profiles like fig, shiitake-tarragon, and pistachio-rose-lime.
3056 N. Lincoln 872-206-8553ententechicago.com
