Slideshows

Slideshow: Inside the New RM Champagne Salon

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The long-awaited RM Champagne Salon— located behind Nellcôte, and accessible only via a walkway that leads inside the industrial courtyard onto which both the Nellcôte building and g.e.b.’s present a face— held a preview event last night for friends and media. A much more intimate space than Nellcôte, it is also, for that reason, more successful at seeming a world apart from Chicago, a vaguely decadent (with its black columns and ceiling) evocation of a Belle Epoque past, with maybe a little of Edward Gorey’s playfully macabre illustrations thrown in. Early reports that the menu would focus on (besides champagne) snacks like tea sandwiches and mignardises made it seem too twee to be successful as a spot for dating couples looking to impress, but as Jared Van Camp explained to us, the menu is now more robust, ranging from oysters to crepes with wild mushrooms to a curated selection of cheeses, and it’s easier now to see it carving out a niche offering various forms of Gallic carnality. We came back with some pictures, but frankly, it was a party, there’s not a lot to say— so taking off from the room’s own sense of constructed fantasy, we have captioned our pictures with the story Gorey might have told in a book like The Curious Sofa. It opens to the public on Thursday.

Slideshow: Inside the New RM Champagne Salon