It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving 2025, and Prime & Provisions was experiencing its best year yet. The sophisticated Loop steakhouse, which DineAmic Hospitality co-founders Luke Stoioff and David Rekhson opened in 2015, was also celebrating its 10th anniversary. The next three weeks were packed with holiday parties followed by a sold-out New Year’s Eve celebration.
But everything came to a halt that afternoon when a fire started in the kitchen’s exhaust system. While it caused extensive damage to the kitchen, it was the massive amounts of water needed to put it out that created the most destruction in the 350-seat restaurant. It closed that day.
“It was tough walking through a restaurant that you put a lot of emotion into building and creating and had over a decade of memories in,” says Rekhson of his post-fire visit. “It was emotionally challenging to see it in that state.”
On Saturday, July 18, more than seven months after closing, Prime & Provisions reopened with 90 percent of the staff returning. “We essentially rebuilt the restaurant,” says Rekhson.
Fans of Prime & Provisions will recognize many items on the menu. “We knew we weren’t going to create many new dishes because people have fallen in love with this menu,” says Rekhson. Rather, the culinary team, led by corporate chef Joe Rizza, went through each item to ensure it was the best version of the dish. (Fun fact: Rizzo started at Prime & Provisions as a sous chef and became its executive chef a few weeks after opening when his predecessor left. He now oversees five of the group’s restaurants.)
The steakhouse still sources all its meat from Meats By Linz, a family-owned purveyor that specializes in cattle raised without hormones or antibiotics and the same supplier for DineAmic’s West Loop Italian-leaning steakhouse Fioretta. “Not to be too philosophical, but it’s a reminder that if you do things right and more humanely, you will end up having a better product,” says Rekhson.
Dry-aging in-house is still a thing at Prime & Provisions, although now diners can get a glimpse of the process via a window in the dining room. The sides of USDA Prime Black Angus beef are still butchered in-house. In the redone kitchen, a new high-heat broiler provides a deeper caramelization to the steaks, which are finished with Wisconsin grass-fed butter. A selection of A-5 Japanese wagyu beef is also available.
Prime & Provision’s popular thick-cut, maple syrup-glazed bacon will be back continuing the tradition of getting lit on fire tableside. Steakhouse dishes like a chilled seafood tower, fresh oysters, and steak tartare are also on offer. The restaurant has added some whimsy via its ducks in a blanket. The appetizer pairs homemade duck sausage with foie gras and wraps it in puff pastry. “We like to take classics and elevate them,” says Rekhson of their riff on pigs in a blanket.
The lunch menu features many of the dishes from dinner with the addition of salads and smaller steaks. A lunch-only shaved rib-eye cheesesteak gets topped with caramelized onions and aged cheddar, while the burger features both dry- and wet-aged meat trimmings.
For dessert, there’s a new sundae cart with toppings ranging from banana chips and gummy bears to chocolate sauce. “It’s like having a little corner ice cream shop come to you,” says Rekhson.
In a stroke of luck, the bottles on the restaurant’s deep reserve wine list were stored in the basement and survived the fire. For its new cocktail program drinks are named after iconic Chicago buildings, a nod to Prime & Provisions location surrounded by many of them. The Builder’s Old Fashioned (smoked Tincup Bourbon, demerara sugar, walnut liqueur, and bitters) references the 100-year-old building the restaurant calls home.
While extensive work was done on the steakhouse’s interior, the early 20th-century supper club vibe remains. “If you had a fire in a typical restaurant built 10 years ago, you’d probably have a lot of things that you’d want to change because things go out of style,” says Rekhson. “But Prime was built to be a timeless restaurant where you couldn’t tell if it opened in 1922 or 2022.”
In the main dining room, fabric on the half-circle of booths is now a soft green. The art nouveau-inspired curved ceiling was rebuilt, replacing the former gold hue with pewter. Mirror inlays were added too. Lighting was one of the biggest shifts mostly due to the availability of LEDs.
In the lounge area, high-top booths feature a leather tufted back in that same green color as those in the dining room. Next to the bar, a raised area functions as a stage for live music during happy hour. The LaSalle Street patio got a do-over with integrated heat lamps, and on Wacker Drive, a new vine-covered pergola offers additional outdoor seating.
Back when Stoioff and Rekhson opened Prime & Provisions they had only three restaurants. Today, DineAmic operates more than a dozen dining and nightlife spots, including La Serre, Lyra, Fioretta, Siena Tavern, and the just-opened Naia. The area looked a lot different as the popular Riverwalk had yet to be built. “When we opened in 2015, it was a little bit of a gamble as there wasn’t much on this side of the river,” says Rekhson. The duo was also smarting from a recent restaurant opening in Florida that didn’t pan out.
The risk paid out. Prime & Provisions expanded three times during its first decade. But it wasn’t without hardships. Rekhson recalls the day he had to let the group’s 1,200 employees know their restaurants were closing due to COVID. During that time there were high points, too. The few months they were closed, Prime & Provision morphed into a weekly commissary where all the company’s employees could pull up to the curb to get a bag of food for themselves and their family that the restaurant’s culinary team had prepared.
“We have such an emotional connection to this restaurant as we’ve just seen it through so many chapters,” says Rekhson. “It’s seen some of the most exciting moments in our company’s history, and some of the most difficult ones. This restaurant’s kind of brought us as a company, and Luke and I particularly, to life twice already. We want it to bring us back to life a third time.”
Prime & Provisions, 222 N. LaSalle Street; open 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. on Monday to Wednesday; 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Thursday; 11 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. on Friday; 4 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. on Saturday; and 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Sunday.
Lisa Shames
Source link