Chicago Chef of Michelin-Starred Elizabeth Is Coming to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

https://detroit.eater.com/2019/2/18/182 ... -elizabeth

Julia Child inspo menu seriously impressed me after the Harry Potter-themed one, which was good-far-from-great.

Wine pairing was much better than what I’ve had at Elizabeth previously. On the light & sweet side, lots of natural/natural-leaning wines. Loved it.

Hard to do a ‘highlights’ that doesn’t end up being most of the meal, because this was as consistent as I’ve experienced at Elizabeth, and what that means is almost nothing stood out. I was basically happy end-to-end. Anyway, this is some of what I got:

Bouillabaisse, served cold, with a large, nice piece of fish (amberjack, I think) rolled up. Delicious. Served in the same dragon egg dish from HP menu.

Profiteroles filled (stuffed to overflowing almost!) with a warm chicken liver mousse and topped with some mushroom, idk, char, were surprisingly delicious. The mushroom on top was so good I was eating the crumbs off my plate. Came with a cute little truffle bite.

There was a green potato leek soup and I would have happily just had a big bowl of that and a loaf of bread for $25 and called it a meal. It was so good! Only complaint was that it was tasting menu-sized. I wanted so much more! Think the green color came from green onion tops? Had some wine, lots of cream.

I tend to like Eliz’s bread course and this was no different. Tasting menus without bread courses bum me out. Happily, it seems like Chef likes her bread and it won’t be going anywhere!

Two proteins: lobster thermidor and duck l’orange. Lobster was a little salty but really kind of just wonderful. Duck was served two ways (breast and confit-on-bone). Confit was forgettable (and I love duck confit!) but breast was done wonderfully. I’m not sure why, but the duck course was kind of huge, and I would have preferred less duck and a third protein, but I think its size will help to make sure no one leaves hungry.

Only two desserts, a little puff filled with apples (titled a tarte tatin, but upside down) and topped with vanilla cream and a single, small cookie. Very sadly light on dessert. Both were good, but it’s a tarte and a thumbprint cookie and this is a great restaurant, they weren’t going to mess these things up and I needed a little more dessert to end the night.

Menus, generally, are a gripe I have with Elizabeth—please print me a menu! I know maybe a lot of people don’t care for them, but I love a reminder of a great dinner. The bathrooms at Smyth have some great menus framed and I aspire to, someday, do something with some of my menus. Sadly, Elizabeth will never appear on my bathroom wall it seems.

They used to do very nice printed menus, now they email them to you after the meal.
I too love their bread course, but at least once I've felt like I'd have gone home hungry if not for the bread.

Went today for the Game of Thrones Brunch, just wonderful. Each course was named for a location in the stories (but I've forgotten dinner)

First course was Fleabottom: an oat porridge with some of the best yogurt I've ever had, and candied strawberries (I think).

Second course was Castle Black, and more lunch: kale and asparagus salad with truffle vinaigrette and picked rutabaga and pearl onion; black bread with cultured butter (her bread is always awesome), and French onion soup (really good, enough bread in the soup that it's really thick).

Third course was Winterfell: nettle and ramp pasta with pea shoots, Jonah crab, sunny side up egg and house smoked jowl bacon. Almost carbonara, great food.

Last course I can't remember the location: spice babka (made with their croissant dough but maybe a little light on filling), and a lingonberry compote.

Always delightful, not much surprising but perfect in execution and service.

Ex-Next chef Jenner Tomaska’s residency starts today in Lincoln Square

https://chicago.eater.com/2019/7/17/206 ... oln-square

At the New Yorker's website, Helen Rosner praises Iliana Regan’s memoir “Burn the Place,” the first food book to be long-listed for the National Book Award since “Julia Child and More Company,” in 1980 . . .

at newyorker.com, Helen Rosner wrote:In 2008, after nearly a decade or so fighting her way up through Chicago’s restaurant trenches, the chef Iliana Regan quit her job at Alinea—the Sistine Chapel of American culinary modernism—to open a farmers’-market stall selling homemade tortillas and from-scratch ranch dressing. One Sister, as she called the endeavor, was a hodgepodge of ambitious apartment homesteading: buttermilk fermenting on a shelf, mushrooms (the good kind) unfurling in the humidity of her bathroom. In “Burn the Place,” her brutal and luminous memoir, Regan writes, “Mom wasn’t excited about the milk curdling in the pantry or the mushrooms growing in the shower, but she was glad I wasn’t stumbling in drunk out of my goddamned mind every night. I was still drinking, of course. But this other passion, to pursue my ideas, was beginning to change me.”

“Burn the Place” Is a Thrilling, Disquieting Memoir of Addiction and Coming of Age

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Thanks for sharing this review Ronnie:

“Burn the Place” Is a Thrilling, Disquieting Memoir of Addiction and Coming of Age

My library will have this book Nov. 18 and I''m fourth in line...

Elizabeth continues to astound and delight with their '80s Nintendo menu. Lately they've been emailing the full menu after the dinner, but I haven't received it yet.

Not every dish was earth-shattering, and we had a weird long pause in the courses halfway through (for which they comped our drinks), but with a combination of great food, drink and company (SueF), I smiled the whole time. To the delight of the staff, Sue wore the skirt from a costume she'd made a few years ago titled "Pixilated Pixie" which had two-inch-square quilt-like pixels creating sprites from Mario, Link, Joust and Space Invaders with a Pac Man belt (sorry, I don't have a picture of that at hand).

Yoshi Eggs: cocoa butter shell with apple juice and horseradish inside, verbena leaf (the rocks are rocks). A fresh, tasty start.


Power Star: Carrot custard (which I swear was carrot butter) and carrot broth. Osetra caviar and finger lime. Outstanding, my second favorite of the night.


Mushroom coins - I don't remember what was in this, but it didn't have a lot of flavor either. One of the few misfires.


Fire Flower: Rye and caraway tuile over chestnut puree and fresh curd. Really nice flavors on the tuile, fantastically creamy chestnut puree that worked nicely with the dairy.


Mushroom Tea (not pictured) - one of Iliana Regan's staples, perfect levels of salt and umami, and I'd be happy to have a big cup of this, it's kind of sad to get only a 2-ounce tasting portion.

Here's where there was a long pause where nothing came out for a while... but what did was amazing. Lobster (not exactly sure how this fits the Nintendo theme), poached in lobster juice, with celery and black bean. This was like the Plato's cave version of the Shrimp with Lobster Sauce I had as a kid and haven't had matched since. Perfectly cooked pieces of lobster, delicate slivers of water chestnut and celery, black beans. This was a pretty substantial dish compared to the mostly-one-bite items above.


Pumpkin: Roasted pumpkin with the slices re-cooked with pumpkin ash and pumpkin puree. Perfect.


Duck Hunt: Sliced roasted duck breast glazed with honey, topped with fried squash "flowers" and potato "butterflies", and a duck confit brioche bun. The flowers and butterflies were delightfully crispy, the duck really tasty, and the bun showed off Regan's bread skills (but didn't contain any duck meat that I could see, it may have just been made with duck fat). For a last savory course, a little more duck would have been nice, but I didn't go away hungry.


8-Beet Heart: Ruby chocolate, toasted black rice and flower petals. Very rich. Coffee in one of their signature owl mugs behind.


Sesame cake with buttercream and raspberry (the strawberry is raspberry gel), and vanilla malt which perfectly recreated childhood milkshake memories.


Mignardise: a (?) box from the Mario games contained a pair of gold-wrapped shortbreads. Sorry, forgot the picture.

After Culinary and Literary Acclaim, She's Moving to the Woods

The NY Times story linked by Matt is also carried by the Chicago Tribune, which now uses many NY Times stories: https://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/c ... story.html
For those who are blocked by both papers' paywalls, Eater has some information:
https://chicago.eater.com/2020/1/22/210 ... e-ny-times

From Eater
The Lincoln Square restaurant’s many, many fans needn’t go into full apoplectic shock: reached by email on Wednesday morning, the chef wrote that she doesn’t have a closing timeline and plans to keep the restaurant open for the next few years, describing the process as “uncertain.”

“No timeline. Won’t be closed for a while still. Maybe 2021 or 2022,” she wrote to Eater.

This is all from memory so might be a little rough, but in her book she mentions that she intends to do Milkweed for a longer run than before and could be away from the restaurant for up to 6 months and the restaurant could close during that time or could be run by her cdc. She also says that she does not want to be running a restaurant every day forever (and, I think, especially while raising a family). It sounded clear in the book that the restaurant would be closed in the next few years.

It brought an extra layer of elegy to the Star Wars menu that the cinematic saga has concluded and that we may be nearing the end of the current-phase Elizabeth in Chicago. I heard another table muse the same. The 13 galaxy-far-away-themed courses had both more Stormtrooper misses and higher Skywalking heights than others in memory. Most memorable were the porg course - truly one of the best shawarma-profile fowls I or Chewbacca have ever enjoyed - and the "quarter portion" Jakku bread course with a concha-like scored melon roll and some doubly on-the-nose X-wing cultured butter molds. The Mon Calamari chowder could have been proudly served without pun anyplace in New England. The musty (spirulina) green Yoda dessert with wobbly tapioca and earthy crunchies was hilarious as it was delicious.

It was the ramp up - Prequels, perhaps? - that didn't ascend; too many cold bites in a row with smoke as the overly repetitive dominating flavor. My mind went to Big Boss Nass unbidden at the one-note liver and onions bite (instead of Dexter Jettster, from whom one would expect a more multidimensional touch), and the cracker texture for the seafood bites was gritty, calling to mind sand - I hate sand, it's coarse and rough - or poorly shucked oysters when in fact the scallops were of course pristine. Blue milk was not to be seen, but the Cloud City confection was ephemeral with just a hint of double-dealing at its core best left unspoiled. Elizabeth, even in a week of change and without all ion engines firing, remains stellar. One could even say that, with the dark and light in balance, it rhymes.

From Elizabeth Restaurant:

In and effort to help our kitchen staff as best we can, they'll be launching a delivery and curbside service in the next few days. So, if you're local think about helping them out a bit. We're still working out the details, but we'll send an email with details soon. Menus will be announced on our Instagram.

This is a great way to support a small, local business and their employees that are undoubtedly struggling. I was a huge fan of Kitsune's carry-out ramen kits. So I'm sure that whatever they come up with will be great.

For anyone trapped in their home with $5k burning a hole in their pocket, this sounds like an exceptional way to put that fire out . . .

Host Your Event At Elizabeth

in an email, Elizabeth Restaurant wrote:At some point in the future. You know, when things are back to normal. (Or as normal as they're going to get.)

Have the restaurant to yourself for the night.

Whether it’s for a milestone birthday or anniversary, a holiday party, a bat mitzvah for a kid with a surprisingly advanced palate, or one HELL of a promposal.

$5000

Host up to 25 people at Elizabeth on a night TBD. (Once we’re back to some semblance of normality we’ll work with you to set a date, but expect fall or winter.)

10 courses + beverage pairings (wine or zero proof). Tax and service included.

Only 4 of these are available at this price.

Visit HERE to purchase

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