From now on, if it isn’t too much trouble, I would like area restaurateurs to contact me before choosing a name for their new enterprises.
I’m only trying to help. Let’s look at an annotated list of recent additions to the Chicago culinary landscape: 22 Restaurant & Bar Moderne (way 2 many words), Karyn’s Cooked (sounds like a kitchen accident), Blu 47 (What’s a blu? And again with the numbers), Masck (misspelled implication of concealment), and Kitsch’n River North (no com’ment).
My problem has nothing to do with the food. In fact, the only one whose food I’ve tried is 22 Restaurant & Bar Moderne, which I enjoyed, even though it had the less moderne name Room 22 back then.
It’s the idea of all the fussing that bothers me. And I feel that I can speak for food lovers everywhere when I say that we’d rather restaurants focus on being delicious.
The pretty and welcoming Bucktown restaurant Scylla is guilty of what you might call benevolent overnaming. The food tastes terrific, but it would by any other name. Scylla is a nymph who–for reasons typical of the tangled romances in Greek mythology–was transformed into a sea monster with a dog body, 6 heads and 12 feet and who lived her life in misery, snacking on sailors.
Not very appetizing. But it’s meant to reflect the fact that the 28-year-old chef and owner, Stephanie Izard, specializes in fish and seafood (she previously worked at Shawn McClain’s fish-centric restaurant Spring).
I can tell you there’s nothing monstrous going on here. Scylla is located in a two-story house once occupied by Glory; it is sweetly decorated with whimsical paintings of water fairies, banquettes piled with pillows, and pretty sage and eggplant walls. The waiters are nice and professional. One of the menu’s virtues is that it makes it hard to decide: oven roasted monkfish with curried risotto; scallops with foie gras and mushroom ravioli; pan roasted quail with white polenta and apricot-brown ale sauce.
On just the second night of business, we had subtle yet remarkable food. No single ingredient in Izard’s roasted amberjack (which is a bit like tuna, but more delicate) overpowered another, in spite of the fact that it is served with rich braised short ribs and tied together by a spiky drizzle of horseradish creme fraiche.
Izard dares to drizzle, which seems quaint these days, and judging from the few dishes my dining partners and I tried, she is adept at pairing somewhat unexpected flavors without producing the culinary equivalent of an amusing but distasteful party trick. One of my tablemates, Linda, goes to Hawaii on vacations; she was happy to see ono on the menu (we later had a brief, misinformed moment of despair about having eaten a fish in the dolphin family; it’s actually a mackerel). It was a nicely cooked slab of flaky white fish, with a brandade (salt-cod puree) crust, served on a bed of sliced Brussels sprouts, almonds, wild mushrooms and tart cherries. Which worked beautifully.
And Itasca, who has a reputation for being persnickety not to mention bossy about food (or about the best way to cure a cast-iron pan, if you mention you just bought one), enjoyed the grilled beef tenderloin, which was served in thin pink slices fanned out upon a jumble of cipollini onions, fingerling potatoes and root vegetables, in a green peppercorn sauce. I personally loved one of the two starters we ordered–a creamy celeriac soup with a mound of chile-spiked, brown-buttered crab meat. The other–escargot in a big bowl of braised leeks, bacon and sweet garlic (which I could not taste), topped with a tomato compote–I liked not at all. As close-minded as it sounds, I can’t imagine why anyone would eat snails without garlic butter.
The only time we unanimously rejected a dish was at the end of the meal. Scylla’s dessert menu includes an interesting list of artisanal cheeses, as well as ricotta fritters and lemon custard cake, but we opted to share the ice cream tasting: lavender, sabayon, allspice and pistachio. I found three of them lovely, but we all agreed that eating the lavender scoop (which included the flowers and stems rather than a simple infusion) was, as Linda put it, “like eating a sachet.”
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We enjoyed the place enough to engage in a sort of maternal worry session about whether Scylla–a restaurant that seats just 46 people on a somewhat remote corner of Bucktown–would be able to make a go of it. We sincerely hope so. And since I rarely have that kind of conversation about a restaurant, take the fact that we had it at all as a very good sign.
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Scylla is at 1952 Damen Ave. 773-227-2995. Open Tuesday through Sunday for dinner only; closed Monday. Entrees $23-$25.