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  • Legal Sea Foods Chicago Arrives Inside the Marina City Towers

    Legal Sea Foods Chicago Arrives Inside the Marina City Towers

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    As locations go, the just-opened Legal Sea Foods couldn’t have found a more fitting setting than in Marina City, which offers sweeping views of the nearby Chicago River.

    Or as Matt King, president and chief operating officer of Legal Sea Foods, puts it, “It’s always nice whenever you’re eating seafood and you’re on the water.”

    Initially created in 1950 as a fish market in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Legal Sea Foods Chicago is the first non-East Coast location for the chain, which operates 27 restaurants and a seafood production facility. Legal Sea Foods is a New England institution, though locals have strained feelings since the Berkowitz family sold the company in 2020. The fish chowder has been served at every Presidential inauguration since Ronald Regan’s in 1981. The new owner, PPX Hospitality Brands, already has restaurants in Chicago.

    “We have a long history of working in Chicago with Smith & Wollensky, so we are really comfortable with the market,” says King of the neighboring steakhouse, which is also part of PPX. During COVID, Legal operated a ghost kitchen out of Smith & Wollensky to test the market.

    The chowder is a Presidential institution.
    Legal Sea Foods

    A bar

    This is the former Dick’s Last Resort.
    Legal Sea Foods

    Executive Chef Ozzy Amelotti, formerly of The Metropolitan Club and Carnivale, heads up the kitchen of the two-level restaurant, which officially opened on July 30 inside the former Dick’s Last Resort. The all-day menu features a number of the restaurant’s signature dishes, including clam chowder, crab cake, and half-pound lobster roll. Fish and chips, like all its fried seafood offerings, are made with gluten-free proprietary breading. Fresh oysters are a regular feature at all Legal Sea Foods as they are here. Nigiri and maki are newer additions for the chain.

    Amelotti also created dishes specifically for Chicago, including grilled or blackened Lake Superior white fish. Appetizer scallops de Jonghe is a riff on the signature Chicago dish originally made with shrimp, buttery breadcrumbs, sherry, and garlic.

    “You can’t go into a new location and say I’m not going to use anything that’s from there,” says King. “It’s important to connect to where you are. We obviously got our core items and what we are famous for, but there’s always room to add some local flair.”

    The first floor dining room.
    Legal Sea Foods

    Local also applies to one of the on-tap beers. Legal Sea Foods worked with Chicago’s Spiteful Brewing to create a New England-style IPA, Working for the Haze. The signature red and white wine sangrias get an extra kick with the addition of rum and vodka. The wine-by-the-glass program features two pours, six and eight ounces.

    Legal Sea Foods expansive river-level space seats 240 and features a large bar area, main dining room, private event spaces, and an outdoor terrace. A curved staircase leads up to the intimate upper-level Oyster Bar, with bar seating and tables for 30.

    While the 10,000-square-foot riverfront location provides obvious perks, creating the restaurant inside the landmarked Marina City building designed by architect Bertrand Goldberg wasn’t without its challenges.

    A lobster roll with fries.

    The half-pound lobster roll.
    Legal Sea Foods

    “It certainly gives your architects and designers a lot to think about,” says King, citing the dilemma of how to incorporate the curves and turns of the space into the design. One solution was the creation of curved waved-shaped banquette seating that mirrors the curves of the building’s interior core.

    “Instead of trying to hide its uniqueness, we worked with it,” he says. “The space really dictated a lot of the layout, which is one of the things we like. It’s very much Marina City and when you come into that space, you know where you are.”

    Legal Sea Foods, 315 N Dearborn Street (entrance off State St. Bridge, next to Smith & Wollensky). Open for lunch and dinner 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Sunday.

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    Lisa Shames

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  • Smoky, Hot, and Sticky Sweet: South Carolina Barbecue Arrives on Clark Street

    Smoky, Hot, and Sticky Sweet: South Carolina Barbecue Arrives on Clark Street

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    The former Blockbuster Video space along Clark and Wrightwood wasn’t made to house two 100-foot Lang barbecue smokers. Brandon and Katherine Rushing had to significantly alter the ventilation to accommodate their new restaurant, Briny Swine Smokehouse and Oyster Bar.

    The same space was home to HopCat, the Michigan beer bar. During the fall, it was also a frequent popup space for Spirit Halloween. Briny Swine’s crews kept the bar in the same space, and the Rushings hope their South Carolina barbecue and find a Chicago niche with folks who like bourbon, beer, and barbecue. They’ll even stay open until 2 a.m. giving the stretch of Clark Street, which has recently seen the closures of Frank’s and Field House, a charge. Even as the Wiener Circle taunts the new restaurant from across the street.

    This was a former Blockbuster.

    South Carolina barbecue specializes in pork, but Briny Swine also serves seafood, chicken, and turkey.

    This is the Rushings’ third restaurant. They run a Briny Swine in Edisto Beach, South Carolina; and Ella & Ollies, which opened in 2016. Those restaurants will continue as the Rushings move to Chicago with their daughter. Barbecue joints have a certain aesthetic with metal trays and red and white checkered tablecloths. Brandon Rushing says they’ve incorporated some of those standards, but tailored them to Chicago’s big-city tendencies. Rushing also says to look for live music on most nights.

    “It’s not your trays and your plastic ramekins kind of thing,” he says. “You know, it’s a little bit more elevated than that — I think that kind of brings out more of the seafood side and the oyster side of things as well.”

    Briny Swine features South Carolina-style barbecue, which focuses on pork, or whole hog cooking. Brandon Rushing smokes his meat with oak and they’ll have mustard and vinegar sauces on hand. Look for pulled pork and St. Louis spare ribs. Rushing is also proud of his brisket, so beef fans are in luck.

    The St. Louis ribs are smoked over oak.

    Chicago borrows much from Memphis’ barbecue traditions with its sweet and smoky barbecue sauce. South Carolina focuses on dry rub, but Swiny Brine will offer five sauces: Alabama White (mayo, vinegar, water, mustard, horseradish, black pepper), Carolina Gold (mustard-based, vinegar, sugar, ketchup), pepper vinegar (pepper, vinegar, pepper flakes, sugar), red (ketchup, vinegar, brown sugar), and a spicy red variant with chipotle.

    Being part of Lowcountry cuisine, there’s also a variety of seafood options including blackened grouper sandwiches and shrimp rolls. Rushing says it was a task to properly source oysters. The oysters (from Chesapeake, Virginia are salty. He serves them with jalapeño and country ham and fried. For the colder months, he wants to bring a southern tradition to Chicago, the oyster roast.

    Chicago may be a sausage town, just ask it, but Briny Swine is offering it something unique: onion sausage. The late Phil Bardin, a prominent Lowcountry chef, is one of Rushing’s mentors. And he inspired the sausage which is made with pork (instead of the traditional venison) and tons of onions.

    Live music is a daily feature.

    The boiled peanut martini is salty.

    There’s a special food menu at the bar, including a pulled pork sandwich and blue crab hush puppies, that will be available until 2 a.m. Brown liquor fans will have plenty of whisky flights (and some Scotch) to swig. The drink menu also features a boiled peanut martini made with Wheatley Craft Kentucky Vodka and peanut brine. Rushing says the drink was his wife’s idea: “It’s kind of like, a salty briny martini — it actually turned out really fantastic.”

    Walk through the space below as the restaurant officially opens on Saturday, June 1. Walk through the space below.

    Briny Swine Smokehouse and Oyster Bar, 2577 N. Clark Street, open 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. Wednesday through Sunday; reservations via OpenTable.

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    Ashok Selvam

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  • A Swanky French Restaurant Will Replace Ruth’s Chris This Weekend in River North

    A Swanky French Restaurant Will Replace Ruth’s Chris This Weekend in River North

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    New York City-based hospitality brand The Group continues its splashy Chicago expansion with the launch of Parisian brasserie La Grande Boucherie, a restaurant trying to channel the joie de vie of La Belle Epoque-era France parked in the prominent former two-level home of Ruth’s Chris Steak House in River North which has remained vacant for nearly three and a half years.

    Poised to open on Saturday, February 17 at 431 N. Dearborn Street, La Grande Boucherie is the second of three new restaurant projects The Group has planned for Chicago. It follows the late 2023 entrance of Olio e Più, a spacious trattoria perched just steps away from its French sister spot, and precedes the unveiling of intimate 10-seat sushi counter Omakase Room projected for the spring. That’s not to be confused with the Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises venue inside Sushi-San River North the bears the same name.

    Design renderings show off the enormous scale.
    La Grande Boucherie

    A table laid with steaks and French dishes.

    The New York restaurant made a cameo in Sex and the City reboot And Just Like That…
    La Grande Boucherie

    Boka Restaurant Group attempted to usher a new age of French dining in River North when it opened Le Select in January 2023, but it closed 10 months later. Now, a new contender has emerged where Ruth’s Chris spent nearly 28 years; it closed in October 2020, mostly due to deflated downtown traffic during the pandemic.

    As the opening approaches, here’s five things to know about La Grande Boucherie Chicago:

    • The Group invested around $1.5 million to build and install a new facade for the Dearborn Street building, replacing the steak chain’s unremarkable beige brick with a soaring, scrollwork-gilded stone exterior that’s outfitted with 25-foot windows. Despite the time and cost involved, founder Emil Stefkov feels the juice is well worth the squeeze. “It was a super ugly building that we transformed into a jewel, so I’m very happy [and] very proud of it,” he says. “[It’s] literally another landmark building in Chicago.”
    • At a whopping 10,120 square feet, La Grande Boucherie Chicago is The Group’s largest restaurant, outpacing even the New York original, which seats up to 600 and spans half the length of 6 1/2 Avenue in Manhattan. The massive construction project extended to the building’s interior, where workers gutted the structure to create a grandiose ground floor and mezzanine with curved vaulted ceilings, custom mosaic tile floors, and a century-old French glass mural featuring a scene from a Paris cafe — a collection piece that survived the Nazi bombardment of Paris during World War II.
    • Stefkov and New York-based designer Julien Legeard (Olio e Più) tapped French and Chicago crews to create the restaurant’s most prominent element — a 40-seat, 82-foot-long oval-shaped pewter bar crafted with 200-year-old metalworking techniques. That’s where bartenders will lavish special attention on absinthe, a famed symbol of Parisian decadence, served out of traditional fountains. Drinkers can expect around a dozen varieties of absinthe as well as cocktails starring the so-called Green Fairy, a drink favored by Ernest Hemingway. Even happy hour gets the absinthe treatment, as La Grande aims to resurrect the 18th-century tradition of the green hour.
    • For some local color, the team has brought in Chicago bartender Tim Williams of Pour Souls to design the cocktail and absinthe menus (he also created the drinks for Olio e Più) and partnered with modern Jewish deli Steingold’s of Chicago, which will furnish smoked salmon for La Grande’s menu.
    • The Chicago outpost’s food menu will strongly resemble that of its older sister restaurant with a focus on brasserie classics (think French onion soup and escargot) alongside a raw bar and large cuts of meat including chateaubriand for two and plateu de boucher, a “meat-lovers plate” featuring several cuts that can feed up to four. The Group sources its beef from Idaho’s Snake River Farms and ages it on-site.

    Le Grande Boucherie Chicago, 431 N. Dearborn Street, scheduled to open Saturday, February 17, Reservations available via OpenTable.

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    Naomi Waxman

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