Boka Restaurant Group is unveiling a new restaurant March 26 brimming with whimsical details, a carefully concocted ingredient-driven menu and an ode to Chicago’s culinary history.
Gingie is the brick-and-mortar debut from Boka’s newest chef partner Brian Lockwood. There is no tasting menu and everything is à la carte in a way Lockwood hopes will be accessible and fun, but refined and meticulous. Gingie’s menu concept is filed under modern contemporary but emphasizes the “three pillars” of Lockwood’s style of cooking.
“I’m very classically trained in French food, I’ve spent time in Italian restaurants, and then I’m really just obsessed with Japan,” he said. “I love Japan, I love the culture, and I think all three of those cultures, at least from a food language, share similar philosophies where it’s really three, four ingredients and they’re focused on techniques and seasonality and respect for the ingredients.”
Lockwood’s lead up to Gingie spans an illustrious 33 years working in some of the most acclaimed kitchens. He was chef Daniel Humm’s chef de cuisine at both The NoMad and Eleven Madison Park in New York City, including during its rise to No. 1 on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2017, while retaining its three Michelin stars. Before that, he worked at the French Laundry in California under the esteemed Thomas Keller and spent time in multiple Michelin-starred kitchens in Europe, such as El Celler De Can Roca, L’Escaleta and La Subida.
Gingie took over the old GT Prime space in River North. The space is immediately striking. There’s an art museum aesthetic about Gingie that makes it feel intimate and adventurous at the same time. It’s cozy enough for a family of eight to slink into one of those deep red booths, but it maintains a thoughtful edginess.
Before diners are even seated, a quirky focal point is bound to elicit oohs and aahs, and many, many wandering eyes trying to decipher the meaning.
Wrapped around the walls of the dining room is a custom mural by artist Emily Parkinson, nodding to the city’s most influential and beloved restaurants and chefs. There’s a “Mount Rushmore” of four chefs from the now-closed but esteemed Spiaggia (Sarah Grueneberg, Missy Robbins, Tony Mantuano and Joe Flamm), an homage to Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark’s Parachute and many other itty-bitty hidden messages referencing both culinary icons and some of the city’s most sought-after bites.
The menu will have a code to a key identifying the Easter eggs (hint: The Kasama breakfast sandwich) throughout the painting.
Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz, co-founders of Boka Restaurant Group, said the mural was the crowning stroke to building a restaurant with Lockwood at the helm.
“This one is the most fun we’ve had in a long, long time,” Boehm said.
For Lockwood, Gingie culminates out of a fortuitous quirk of fate, by way of “The Bear,” the Hulu show starring Jeremy Allen White.
In Los Angeles at the beginning of 2024, Lockwood was tapped to train White, who plays Carmy — the young, world-class fine-dining chef who returns to Chicago to manage his family’s chaotic sandwich shop — for season three of the show. Lockwood helped White make his on-screen actions look authentic; things like butchering fish, swooping a sauce, the focus it takes to segment a citrus.
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“I feel like a lot of chefs that I have known feel like they have some sort of a parallel with the character Carmy — having spent time in some of those kitchens and gone and done the time. So it does feel a little full circle-ish.”
Soon after, Lockwood was invited to Chicago to work with the cast and crew as a consulting chef on the show for the next two seasons.
That’s when he met BRG co-founders Boehm and Katz. The group operates restaurants and bars across Chicago, including Girl & the Goat, Momotaro and Swift & Sons. The chef-driven concepts have made it one of the best-known restaurant groups in the city.
Gingie is a proper passion project for Lockwood, who was chuffed about the focal point of the open-concept kitchen. Diners will be able to see chefs cooking with fire, and everything else going on in the mammoth-sized kitchen.
“What anchors a big part of the cooking here at Gingie will be an open-fire hearth,” he said. “I’ve never actually gotten a chance to cook over a wood-fired open flame and I’ve never really, truly had the time to just geek out on what hearth cooking can be.”
Lockwood said the open concept was one of his non-negotiables. Starting in his late teens, the Boulder, Colorado, native worked in an Italian restaurant that had an open kitchen where people came up and saw the staff at work, said hello and stayed a while. That dynamic, he said, instilled an idea of what hospitality should look like.
“Somehow it just feels right. All these other kitchens (I worked at) were not open kitchens, but at Eleven Madison Park, it was part of the ethos to go out and do things in the dining room,” he said. “At French Laundry, you’d always have people come back to what chefs were doing… I think kitchen tours were always part of that culture too. Those were beautiful kitchens that everybody was super prideful to maintain, so we were always excited to share with whomever could come.”
That relationship is on full display at Lockwood’s other Chicago restaurant Midōsuji — an intimate eight-seat nouvelle omakase where guests are feet away from the chefs — which opened under BRG in the Chicago Athletic Association in September 2025.
Gingie is much higher in volume and chefs are further away from the diners, but Lockwood is hoping to maintain the ethos of getting to see in real time “how things eat.”
“I have to mention Gary Danko, I spent three years with him in my early 20s, he’s a pioneer of California cooking. He had this thing about how things eat that stayed with me,” he explained. “Being able to see people eat, you see what works, you see how cumbersome something is — does the spoon get to the bottom of the bowl or not? Are people left with sauce that they wish they could get to? All those little details are really informative.”
Offered as a starter on the menu is Temaki sushi, also known as handrolls, in three varieties. Diners can choose between Jonah crab with miso-egg yolk and horseradish, tempura rock shrimp with shiso and sriracha emulsion or a salmon handroll with bonito cream and smoked trout roe.
The menu features several ingredient-driven dishes, including a spicy tuna dip with avocado. The tuna mixture has a kick from fermented jalapenos, lemon oil, spicy chili oil and a bit of yuzu, plus on the bottom a sesame oil puree with hot mustard. Lockwood said it’s visually simple, served with puffed tapioca chips that he hopes people use to scoop up the tuna dip.
“The dish is hopefully going to encourage people to eat with their hands,” he said. “I love encouraging that moment of breaking bread with whomever you’re with, and I think it’s a good icebreaker for people just to get comfortable.”
Some items will rotate based on seasonality, but Lockwood said he’s still figuring out “where to get the best of everything” in Chicago and in farms nearby.
One seasonal item Lockwood called out is the maitake mushroom “steak.” The mushroom is marinated for more than 24 hours before being roasted and then grilled over the wood fire and glazed with a ginger toast and black garlic sauce. Other vegetarian items include a black peppered tofu dish with rice that can also be ordered vegan.
“These are always things I take into consideration when designing the menu. I come from cultures where there were typically set menus and tasting menus, and you always had to have your accommodations for every course. But now, given the opportunity to have an à la carte canvas, we’ve made sure there’s something for everyone,” Lockwood said.
A lobster lasagnette features butternut squash, chestnut and tarragon; while another seafood standout, “fruits de mer” offers up a tower of lobster, razor clam with yuzu and fennel, cherry stone clam with potato and pimenton, scallop with shiso and pistachio and oyster with grape and finger lime.
A sweet dish Lockwood’s particularly excited about is the honey meringue, a stark-white, oval-shaped dessert he’s been working on for 15 years. It has grated sesame brittle, toasted sesame seeds, ice cream “that’s just really pure and tastes like milk” and whipped honey topping that’s as fluffy as shaving cream.
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“You see the meringue, you see the sesame, but you kind of wonder, where’s the ice cream? Break it with the back of a spoon, and the whole thing falls apart,” he explains, eyes lit up. “It looks very simple and there’s a moment of discovery with it. It’s just delicious texturally and it’s not overly sweet.”
Another dessert worth saving room for: the Key lime pie with a miso graham cracker crust, sherbet and toasted meringue.
Kristine Antonian, one of Gingie’s culinary directors, worked closely with Lockwood to create the restaurant’s roster of refined desserts, while Ashley Santoro, the director of strategic operations and beverage for BRG’s brands, tailored the drink program to be an ingredient-driven experience bar-side too.
“I was so inspired by the intentionality and creative use of ingredients and techniques Chef Brian brings to Gingie’s menu that it felt crucial for the beverage program to reflect that same spirit,” Santoro said. “Much like the food, our signature cocktails put an approachable twist on the classics while showcasing unexpected, savory flavors.”
The Grapefruit Song is Santoro’s personal favorite, combining a slightly pink-hued grapefruit gin with chamomile and marigold vodka.
As Lockwood carves out his culinary footprint in Chicago, he’s holding onto pieces of his past.
At Midōsuji, each one of the ceramics was created by Kazu Oba, a Japanese-born ceramic artist and sculptor who Lockwood met back in Boulder. At Gingie, Parkinson, the artist behind the mural, was one of the “dreamweavers” focused on creating highly personalized, surprise moments for guests at Eleven Madison Park.
“The road to get here has been personal, it has been emotional and I feel like it’s an accumulation of my experiences and what I love about food — it’s different, both aesthetically and the menu,” Lockwood said. “And I could have gone to any city, as anyone can. But I think I ended up here for a reason.”
Gingie, 707 N. Wells St., 312-600-6305, gingiechicago.com