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"While $205 is a lot to spend for a meal from a chef you’ve never heard of, you don’t eat the chef’s name. What you’re paying for is the discovery of a talent still in its infancy, an artist whose ideas—good and bad—are pouring out at a remarkable rate. People compare Elizabeth to Alinea, but [chef Iliana] Regan is less like Achatz 2013, the impeccable superstar, than Achatz 2001, the ambitious kid whose ability had not been identified beyond his circle at Trio," Jeff Ruby says of Iliana Regan, Elizabeth's chef-owner. He clearly relishes an experience where "no other restaurant in Chicago presents a more undistilled vision of its maker." What he didn't relish, though, were the foodies he shared the communal table with: "a smug concert pianist, two socially stunted computer geeks, a name-dropping phony, two large Canadians—one making love to his Canon EOS, the other napping between courses—and my wife." For Ruby, Elizabeth is caught in a tension between Regan's vision and foodies crossing it off their list for bragging rights: "Some of us take it all too seriously and others not seriously enough. No one can tell the difference anymore because we’re all simultaneously bloviating." Which as predictions go, is pretty prescient: it only took a couple of days before the reviewer got reviewed himself in the comments below by someone who says they were one of his fellow diners. [Chicago]

"You really want to breathe plaster dust all over again?" Claudia Gassel, co-owner of Storefront Company, recalls asking her partner, Steve Harris. The Wicker Park restaurant had only opened in March, and now Harris was proposing ripping out a wall during the week they were closed after New Year's. But the idea made sense: one of the restaurant's most popular features was the four-seat chef's counter, which looked straight into the kitchen. And so they spent the closed week tearing out the existing back bar, creating more than a dozen ringside seats which would look straight onto the cooks at work, and joining restaurants such as Next and Grace as one of the places where you get the most direct and dramatic view of what's happening in the kitchen.

A few months back we held a colloquium with colleagues in the food coverage biz about the speeding-up of the review cycle— the fact that it seems inevitable that reviews from ordinary diners will hit online sites like Yelp almost immediately, and how that affects how long mainstream media critics should wait before evaluating a restaurant. Well, strike the "almost" from in front of that "immediately"; here's a perfect example of what we're talking about. Sumi Robata Bar, the new Japanese restaurant from ex-Japonais chef Gene Kato which we've covered here, had its soft opening last night. And it's not merely that some of the very first customers to eat there last night posted something publicly— literally the first three customers ever served appear to have posted their accounts at Yelp and/or LTHForum, offering praise for certain things but also critiquing others, and attempting to settle on an overarching view of the restaurant— based literally on its first hour of service. Does this make any sense? Is it inevitable anyway? Probably, but it's certainly food for thought on what you can actually say meaningfully about a restaurant when you're also competing to have the very first words to say about it anywhere.