A couple of new chain fish owned by the same company crawl into a barrel for Julia Kramer to shoot at. The company is called Consolidated Restaurant Operations and its two concepts, opening within a week or two of each other, are the glitzy, expensive Mexican spot Cantina Laredo and the dripping-money expensive steakhouse III Forks. She finds their cost “easier to stomach at the steakhouse—a genre of restaurant in which paying loads of money for a piece of salted meat is considered a privilege—than the Tex-Mex cantina.” Tableside prep is a hallmark at Cantina Laredo, but “Top Shelf Guacamole… is pretty much your standard guac: I’m still trying to figure out what I should have gotten out of watching someone mortar-and-pestle it together.” The seafood at III Forks comes in for some pretty harsh words (including “tough” and “unappetizingly wet”), but she does find one meaty indulgence to praise: “Chicken-fried prime rib, three slabs of rich beef coated in a (again) heavily peppered breading, fried as you would chicken and oh-so-wonderfully ladled with gravy. I thought I was being delicate leaving a piece behind on my plate; my companion likened the event to a scene from Woman v. Food.” [Time Out Chicago]
Chicago Gluttons puts itself straight into a scene from The Lady and the Tramp to sing the praises of old school spaghetti, doggie-style: “For years, I’ve been searching for the perfect spaghetti and meatballs. Not some fancy ass Slagel Farms Anti-Biotic Free, Carbon Neutral, Organic Meatball horse pucky… I want that salty carb bomb that cartoon italians throw out the back door for the strays. Some doggy first date s–t.” Where do they find it? “The ultimate spaghetti and meatballs in Chicago is served somewhere you’d least expect. Think seafood, think cereal, think mindbogglingly slow yet friendly service. Glenn’s f—ing Diner. Gotdamn.” [Chicago Gluttons]
Dominic Armato, once and future Chicagoan who runs the popular Top Chef blog Skillet-Doux, joins in the praise for Tony Hu’s Lao Hunan : “There’s an education to be had in this menu, to say nothing of what it will be like when its size triples. I want to come back, I want to take some time, I want to develop a better understanding of what Hunanese cuisine brings to the table, and I was rocked deeply enough by a few of these dishes that I’m confident the kitchen at Lao Hunan will be an excellent guide.” Even the controversial Maoist decor puts him in mind of an even more disturbing theme restaurant he once visited in China: “On an old blog, I once chronicled a visit to ‘First Work Team,’ a theme restaurant intended to inspire nostalgia for the days when famine was killing off tens of millions of Chinese by serving unseasoned mashed tubers to diners sitting on bare concrete floors. No joke.” [Skillet-Doux]
