Peek Inside Stunning La Serre, an Ode to Saint-Tropez in Fulton Market

The owners of Bar Siena, Fioretta, and Lyra are about to open their sixth restaurant in the West Loop and Fulton Market area. La Serre, which should open mid-March, is a French-Mediterranean restaurant from DineAmic Hospitality Group with a unique all-season ledge room and guillotine windows overlooking Fulton Market.

Ownership describes the menu as coastal French-Mediterranean cuisine, something DineAmic’s team has experience in. Lyra partner Athinagoras Kostakos, the former Top Chef: Greece champion, has cooked in Monaco, home of legendary chef Alain Ducasse. Chef Nikitas Pyrgis has cooked at La Guérite, a restaurant in Cannes, France that’s only accessible via boat.

“Once we started talking about this, we thought, ‘Wow, you guys have a lot of background in [French cooking], we should do something with that,’” says DineAmic co-founder David Rekhson.

La Serre will break away from heavier brasserie fare and focus on the south of France, Saint-Tropez, and Provence in particular. Rekhson calls the “the Napa Valley of France” where a bounty of quality ingredients exists. Of course, being DineAmic, Rekhson and fellow DineAmic co-founder Lucas Stoioff blend all these ideas to create a restaurant that they think will appeal to local Chicago customers.

“Ours is a distinctly coastal French brand and fare, as opposed to a lot of the more inland Parisian classic brasseries that have opened up in the last couple of years,” Stoioff says, referring to a certain restaurant that opened in River North without mentioning its name.

Stoioff and Rehkson mention several tableside preparations and opportunities to splurge. A 44-ounce, double-cut beef ribeye cote du boeuf is cooked over hardwood charcoal before being trotted out on a tray outfitted with a satellite burner. The steak is sliced tableside while the sauce is prepared and finished Au Poivre or truffle Diane style (Stoioff is a big fan of the latter). An Old Fashioned uses truffle-washed bourbon and served with black truffles shaved tableside. A drink called the Caspian uses dill olive oil and is paired with a bronze bunny statue holding a small bowl of caviar. There are a few others that the duo wants customers to discover at the restaurant and be surprised. A raw bar and a menu of one-bite starters are also served in the French amuse-bouche tradition.

Located on the second floor of a new building on the corner of Green and Fulton Market, the space is light and airy with the kitchen in the back and a large bar greeting visitors at the front. The terrace, a ledge that flows along Fulton Market, features overhead heaters and the aforementioned windows which open vertically. DineAmic wants diners to feel like they’re in southern France, even when temperatures dip. Stoioff says the space looks like “an old provincial greenhouse that’s been here for 100 years.” The greenhouse design and the resources invested in the HVAC system will allow the restaurant to keep its windows open even on cold fall nights.

“When you come inside, it feels like it’s summertime in the south of France, and you’re overlooking Fulton market, and our heating, engineering, and capabilities give us the ability to have the windows open a lot longer than we would normally have because of all of our heat we’ve installed,” Stoioff says.

Not to be forgotten is a companion restaurant that will soon open. Bar La Rue is separate from La Serre. Look for more details in the coming weeks. But for now, take a walk through La Serre before it opens next week and enjoy photos of a few of the food and drink options.

La Serre, 307 N. Green Street, opening Monday, March 11, reservations available via OpenTable.