Editor’s note: Chef John Asbaty left in August 2015.
At a glance his menu doesn’t seem much more inspired than those at the dozens of newer middling restaurants trafficking in the standard charcuterie, burgers, roasted chicken, and house-made pasta, but the kitchen is operating on a different level. Take a seasonal vegetable tartare: a sizable deposit of finely brunoised multicolored root vegetables (someone got an A in Knife Skills) crowned with a golden sous-vide duck yolk and piled atop of a slice of fried bread schmeared with cool, creamy quark cheese. The elements in this fragile environment come together so beautifully you wonder why you’ve never experienced the combination before. The last two components, the bread and the cheese, are just two examples of the extraordinarily good things going on with dairy and grains in the house.
Still, there’s not much more to whine about. Wedge fries—a style not often seen in recent times—are creamy inside with an almost translucent crispy exterior (skip the treacly smoked ketchup for the molten cheese sauce). On a “duck board,” the perfectly decent duck liver mousse and pickled cauliflower are upstaged by a crispy-skinned confit duck leg.
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