MUHĀJIR
★★
2630 N. Clark St., Lincoln Park
Dinner for two: $250
Tip: Ask your server to secure you a seat after dinner in the adjacent speakeasy, Bobo. The cocktails lean Filipino and make for a fun nightcap.
★ Recommended
★★ Very Good
★★★ Excellent
★★★★ Exceptional
For three years, Zubair Mohajir was able to perform a minor miracle at the now-closed Coach House, serving some of the city’s most exciting cooking in a kitchen equipped with nothing but induction burners. This was a setup for making a coffee shop breakfast sandwich, not a seven-course tasting menu that cast Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern flavors through a personal lens. But Mohajir knew he had something important to say.
Born into a minority-Muslim community in South India and raised in Qatar before his family settled in Chicago, he has a keen sense of how flavors move across borders and recombine afresh. His insight gleaned from both his study of history and his instinctive attuning to the dramas that play out on the tongue made his food pop at Coach House and its casual, drinky sibling, Lilac Tiger. It’s also what made his voice on Top Chef so compelling and what has allowed him to lead a group of talented chefs in a burgeoning restaurant group that includes the Indian-Mexican fusion spot Mirra with Rishi Kumar — the duo are on Food & Wine’s list of this year’s best new chefs — and the South Asian–Filipino coffee shop Sarima Cafe with Jacob Dela Cruz.
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Muhājir is the restaurant Mohajir has long worked toward. In collaboration with Dela Cruz, he offers a menu that spans South and Southeast Asia and presents something of a thesis about the migration of flavors, techniques, ingredients, and meaning through cooking. (The restaurant’s name, one letter off from his own, means “migrant” in Arabic and Urdu.) The high-concept mission statement talks loftily of the Spice Route, yet, frankly, still feels underbaked. The food, however, is anything but. It’s lusty, vital, provocative, and grounded in experience. This is most apparent when the team cooks what it knows. A nubbly mash of fava beans, heady with cumin and a fine friend to a slab of oil-soaked toasted focaccia, appears via a recipe for ful that Mohajir’s dad learned from an Egyptian neighbor. A pea shoot and unripe papaya salad, green on green, shimmies in a vinaigrette fashioned from salabat, the ginger tea that Dela Cruz grew up drinking in the Philippines.
Muhājir is a dream restaurant for these chefs thanks to its dream kitchen, visible in the rear of the simple dining room. Unlike the rudimentary setup at Coach House, here they cook on a wood-burning oven and parrilla grill and follow the rhythms of the fuel. Duck breasts hang over the flames during the day to render their fat. A whole branzino emerges from the grill with crackly skin, then is sandwiched on a plate between briny Moroccan olive relish and creamy Turkish walnut sauce. At night, Mohajir tucks clay pots filled with beef cheeks (wagyu in breed, halal in butchering) to braise over the dying embers for South Asian nihari, its gravy a symphony of spices and hot chile with a tempering flurry of fresh ginger applied at the end.
While this is an exciting menu, it can also be a confusing one. The 15 à la carte dishes are described in spare language but use senior-seminar-level food geography terms. If you don’t know what “palapa” and “Bicol style” mean, join the club. The servers may have a thoughtful answer, or a rote one, or may have to ask the kitchen. A meal here can be a parade of tasty mysteries that you respond to sensually, but with so much storytelling that goes into the food, you can’t quite follow the through line. It’s like dropping into The Wire mid-season and struggling to figure out who everyone is but still enjoying it.
Only after interviewing Mohajir did I learn that the wonderful green onion relish called palapa was a Filipino prep involving coconut fat, or that the Bicol-style mussels reference a Filipino pork dish made with shrimp paste and calamansi vinegar. That one was a rare miss: While the watery broth had flavor galore, it couldn’t rescue the pot of mussels cooked into hard bullets.
The flavors can be as loud as the folks at the next table in this hard-surfaced room. Sometimes, that’s a big yay, as with the South Asian lentil dumplings called faraa, which wallow in a luscious coconut cream with fresh chanterelles that’s like carbonara for vegans. Sometimes, though, it’s too much. Smoked hamachi with a varuval spice paste and tangy-hot pineapple achar so overloaded the tongue I felt like my mouth needed a hard reboot. The cocktails, from longtime collaborator David Mor, also go for broke. The Alma, a martini with anise-flavored arak and clarified mango, proved too dense and boozy. I was happy to see a txakoli on the small wine-by-the-glass list, since this food awakens to spritzy uplift.
I loved most of the food, but none as much as the Duck Numidian Experience. Remember those duck breasts hanging over the fire? They are the centerpiece of a dish Mohajir has been tinkering with since he first caught a glimpse of it in a cookbook of medieval Arab recipes from the Iberian Peninsula. This is better than the version he served at Coach House. The skin is rendered and glazed, the meat still red and redolent of that cooked-on-the-bone flavor, the reduction sauce and seasonal jam perfection. The confited duck legs are added to a flavorful rice. My only caveat: Considering its $150 price, the dish could use a little more rizz in appearance.
Mohajir and Dela Cruz would benefit from embellishing both their plating and their messaging. More-descriptive language on the menu and some effective, brief spiels from the servers would help engage guests not just with the exciting flavors but with the thoughtful messaging behind them. But one part of the storytelling at Muhājir, written on the menu’s first page, couldn’t be more clear: “We are all migrants.”
John Kessler is a freelance dining critic and columnist for Chicago magazine.