nightwood

Chicago: Nightwood

It has all the makings of a perfect neighborhood restaurant: A terribly charming and adorable staff, a prime corner location right down the street from the hood’s best bar (Skylark), and a gorgeous, semi-rustic dining room that seems to have a permanent glow about it. Unfortunately, residents of the Pilsen neighborhood will have no chance to make Nightwood their own. Even though it’s only been around for a week, the restaurant is already a destination. This comes as a surprise to precisely no one. The cult that worships at Jason Hammel and Amalea Tshilds’s other restaurant, Lula Cafe, has been holding its breath for the past 15 months as they waited for this place to open. But the sheer simplicity of Nightwood’s food almost seems to be at odds with the fanfare surrounding it. Perfectly cooked trout arrives with nothing more than a few sweet beets; hearty pork rib ravioli merely gets tossed with some salted butter; a roast beef sandwich is dressed with just a smear of chicken liver. In fact, it’s a salad of all things—a lamb-and-pork ragu topped with spicy greens and poached egg—that’s as complicated as chef Jason Vincent’s menu gets. Vincent could probably throw a few more ingredients into every dish and nobody would blink. Preparing food any more satisfying than this, however, would be a challenge.

Nightwood 2119 S. Halsted St., Chicago (312-526-3385; nightwoodrestaurant.com)

By David Tamarkin

06.05.09

Los Angeles: Barbrix

Maybe it’s that the outside of Barbrix, located in hip Silver Lake, looks like a burnished version of the 1940s-era house it once was; or that owners Claudio Blotta and his wife, Adria Tennor, have a way of waving hi to every diner as if they’ve known them forever. But some say that the overwhelming success of this 50-seat wine bar, just three weeks old, has more to do with the fact that the neighborhood has long needed a spot that serves good food and affordable wine. Either way, as the sun set the other night, it seemed that half the community’s residents began threading their way down the hill towards Barbrix as if by mass decree, primed to enjoy the clean, distinct flavors of chef Don Dickman’s seasonal menu. We loved our small—but not still-hungry small—plates of delicate Sicilian veal meatballs; a Turkish salad of diced vegetables and tangy dabs of Greek yogurt; and grilled New Zealand lamp chops with mint pesto and eggplant purée. Blotta, whom locals know as the Argentine charmer from Campanile and La Terza, has a way with personal touches: He helped pour the cement in the front dining patio, showed the landscaper where to plant the lemon and olive saplings that will someday grow into fruiting trees, and made sure customers wouldn’t have to spend more than $50 for a bottle of wine. “We want Barbrix to be a home away from home,” beamed Blotta. “We had regulars the first week we opened.”

Barbrix 2442 Hyperion Ave., Los Angeles (323-662-2442; barbrix.com)

By Margy Rochlin

06.05.09

Hampshire, U.K.: Little Chef

The last time I ate at Little Chef, the U.K.’s largest chain of motorway fast-food outlets, the kitchen had a power outage, so they couldn’t make my omelet. “The microwave isn’t working,” the waiter said. That was three years ago, before the company’s new owners called in Heston Blumenthal to pep up the menus and showcase the often-painful evolution on a reality TV show. I decided I owed Little Chef another visit. Driving out to Popham, about an hour southwest of London, I found the recently revamped pilot branch looking more like a U.S. diner made over by Paul Smith—with witty details (a cloud mural on the ceiling) and a chic red-and-white color scheme—than the dowdy rest stop all Brits had come to know. More importantly, the menu now showed some respect for British fast-food: Braised ox cheeks were slow-cooked until tender in a sauce rich with red wine, pearl onions, and lots of bosky wild mushrooms—a stunner of a dish worthy of the best gastropubs. There was no more plastic cartons of UHT (“ultra-heat-treated”) milk; it now came properly warmed in a jug to accompany the coffee. And as for wine, it is now dispensed by the glass from Enomatic wine-preservation machines. I’m looking forward to a return trip, possibly to try Blumenthal’s take on those hoary clichés of British road food: scampi, chicken tikka masala, and banoffee pie. P.S. They’re not nuking the omelets anymore.

Little Chef A303 Popham Services, Micheldever, Winchester, SO21 3SP, Hampshire (01256-398490; littlechef.co.uk)

By James Cameron

06.05.09

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