Spring -- a mixed review (long)

After hearing rave after rave about Spring, I decided to go there for a birthday dinner on Sunday. While my overall impression was good, I would not give it a 'rave' review. There were several areas where I felt that a restaurant of this caliber (and price-- almost $100 pp incl tax&tip) did not deliver to my expectations.

My problems mainly had to do with the service.

1) At a restaurant that is this expensive, I would expect the waitstaff to be extremely well informed. I did not, however, get that impression from Spring. When I asked about the wine choices, the server was unable to offer any real advice... and when I narrowed the choices for her to asking if she could tell me the differences between the three Gruner Veltiners on the list (which ranged in price from $50-$80), she again, had no idea.

2) This is perhaps a minor pet peeve, but I get very annoyed when there are too many busboys hovering around me. I would like a long, relaxed meal, and feel rushed when someone is standing over my shoulder to whisk my plate away before I've even put my fork down.

3) While my entree was phenomenal, the appetizer and dessert were nothing quite as spectacular as I would have expected...

Without further ado...

The Meal:

Amuse-bouche:

What appeared to be tuna tartare and a hint of fresh mint wrapped in cucumber a la maki

Appetizers:

-6 fresh oysters

These were delicious, fresh, flavorful

-Eggplant masala

I was not the one who ordered this, so I only have one bite to go off of. It was however agreed to be the best appetizer of the three. Flavoring was pleasant and not overpowering.

-Tempura soft shell crab in ginger-lemon(?) sauce

Very good, though hard to taste the crab through the thick tempura bbatter. Sauce was good but overall I would have liked to taste more.

Entrees:

These blew me away. Definitely the highlight of the meal.

I got the red snapper topped with a few green beans thrown with a light vinaigrette, on a bed of lobster risotto (out of this world delicious). This was an amazing dish, the fish done to perfection, the risotto melt-in-your-mouth perfect, the accompanyign sauce incredible.

Other entrees ordered were: Australian Baramundi (fish) with trumpet mushrooms and monkfish wrapped in smoked pancetta (I think) on a bed of polenta. Good, but I think mine was better

Desserts:

I got a lemon parfait topped with mission figs. It was good but not *spectacular* in its creativity or flavors. Other desserts were: passionfruit panna cotta and yuzu cream beignets with strawberry-basil ice cream. The strawberry-basil ice cream was great. The yuzu cream (custard?) beignets tasted like...beignets. As in, the same kind of beignets that you can get for $1.

You're not alone. I think you did a very good job of summing up my feelings about the service Spring as well.

I've found that for real wine advice there is usually someone else on staff that your waiter will need to get the attention of. I'm not sure if they always have a wine steward in-house. If they don't, then you're out of luck because the staff is not knowledgable in this area.

I also do not like the over-attentiveness of the staff. It boders on "too much" and makes me feel rushed as well.

Consequently, I have never had a meal which was short of excellent at Spring. For my money it is the best place in Chicago for fresh, inventive seafood. The minor service gripes are vastly overshadowed by the quality of the meal, in my opinon. Also, the host/management staff are phenomenal.

I too had similar experiences-- I had a meal with some spots of excellence, but was very disappointed with wine there and found the service irritating (if they straightened my silverware one more time, I'd have stabbed them with a fork). Here's something I posted on another site in May of 2003:

Respecting my meal rather than loving it

Wanting to do something in the ballpark of my anniversary dinner last year, without necessarily trying to outdo it-- since it was the 20-course tasting at Trio, which is surely sui generis-- I consulted with a mysterious black-clothed gentleman known for his discerning fine dining tastes. I told G Wiv that I was thinking of Spring or Kevin, but would consider other possibilities on the new restaurant scene.

His suggestions: Spring, or Kevin.

Okay, he suggested more than just those two, but he agreed that those were top contenders, and so Spring it was. (By the way, I used Open Table, second time I've used it, very helpful for finding available seatings without a million phone calls.)

When I sat at the bar and got my first look at the menu, I have to admit I was less sure of the choice. I like Asian influences fine, I like minimalism fine, but this menu seemed so Asian-minimalist, so many white fishes in thin, subtle broths, that I felt sure I would react to it like I did to Crofton on Wells, which was a temptation to send out for a jar of puttanesca or Grey Poupon or Arthur Bryant's barbecue sauce or something, ANYTHING, to Kick It Up a Notch. Trio, to name one, delivered subtle flavors, but distilled to essences that exploded in your mouth. That kind of minimalism I love. The kind where you have to hold the broth in your mouth for a minute to hunt out the faint hint of ginger, that's just too wussy for me.

I will cut to the punchline and say that even when my wife and I ordered the things on the menu that seemed to have the strongest flavor profiles, we spent the evening at the event horizon of wussiness, always on the edge of seeing subtle flavors disappear entirely down the black hole of invisibility. When it was good it was very very good, but there were more than a few times that I had to remind myself to taste the stuff which was in my mouth, since it wasn't doing much to call attention to itself. Considering how full the room was of restaurant show guys on expense accounts talking loudly, I can't help but wonder how many of them were bitterly regretting that they hadn't just gone to Smith & Wollensky and ordered the 128-oz. sirloin and the baked potato the size of John Malkovich's head instead of a petite square of Hawaiian Ono (my advice: never eat a fish that broke up the Beatles) in a tapwater infusion.

So anyway, didn't take extensive notes but here's what I remember:

Appetizers:

Scallop on potato "raviolis" in a white truffle sauce-- sauce was excellent, a subtle flavor that was on the right side of subtlety. Scallop was all by itself on top, practically holding up a sign that said "Yes, you just paid $8 and got one scallop! For two people!" As for the raviolis... by what possible logic are three fried potato slices "raviolis"? Why not "cassoulets" or "samovars," that would have made as much sense.

When you add to the pretension and minimalism of the dish itself the time spent by the waiter minutely moving every single item of cutlery and glassware on our tiny table, in a note-perfect imitation of my late father's obsessive-compulsive disorder (he would spend hours absent-mindedly straightening all the pens and ashtrays on the kitchen table), this dish, though quite good, was hands-down the comic highlight of the evening.

Foie gras mousse-- with raisin toast and a glob of pickled beet jelly. Not bad, although the beet jelly was so sweet that it bordered on Welch's. But the combination, unlike a similar one at Trio a year ago, worked. The main hitch with this dish was the inevitable trendy square dish it was served in, which guaranteed that a good quarter of the mousse could not be retrieved by any of the available cutlery.

Green salad-- though the menu included "salads" which I would have considered to be as misnamed as the raviolis if I didn't know about Thai beef salad, we ordered simple green salads. They came in a supposed balsamic dressing which was mild enough that your grandmother would have pronounced it delicious at the Walnut Room.

Main courses:

Black Bass in lobster sauce-- Having had more South American steaks in the last few weeks than I really care to admit, I took a chance and ordered White Fish in Thin Broth. It was an event horizon dish, extremely subtle, but if you thought about it, it was good. Around it were-- I think we have a trend!-- ramps, along with some supposed parmesan gnocchi which, overpowered (a very relative term in this case) by the lobster sauce, could have been Kraft Mini-Marshmallows for all I could tell.

Ribeye-- My wife, the rare woman who will order red meat in a chic restaurant full of women off of Sex and the City (maybe SHE was wishing she was eating the 128-oz. sirloin), got slices of ribeye atop some kind of little ball-bearing pasta in a beef broth. The ribeye went fast but she said she wasn't that crazy about the pasta part, so I tried it and I thought it was really good, a sort of subtle heartiness that was exactly what I needed at that point. So after I ate mine, I finished her dish for her.

Dessert:

It took her two seconds to settle on the chocolate ganache with chocolate gelato on blood orange slices, which would be chocolate cake with chocolate ice cream to us Amurricans. It was good, but nothing unusual. Normally I would order something quite different, like the rhubarb dessert, but I was tempted by the other chocolate choice, a "dome" of chocolate caramel mousse in a ginger broth.

It was the best choice I made all night, the one Wow! and easily the most inspired dish of the evening, even though it took some doing to figure out how to eat it right. (They should have given me Trio-style instructions.) The best way was to use the fork to break off a piece of the dome, then use the soup spoon to get a spoonful of the ginger broth and eat it with the mousse. The light sweet gingery flavor and the more robust mousse came together perfectly at that point in a mix of textures and flavors and temperatures that was, indeed, Trio-like.

Wine:

I wish I could leave it on that happy note but unfortunately I have to talk about the wine. We ordered three wines by the glass, two after asking for recommendations, and I wouldn't say that any of them was particularly exceptional. I asked for a red wine recommendation and was immediately steered to the most expensive glass on the red list ($14), a merlot which I found much too harsh and tannic, presumably opened too young or just not what it was cracked up to be generally, or possibly-- very possibly-- open too long, it really could have been from the night before or even earlier. I really should have sent it back, it would have been good to see how they handled that; in any case, I took most of the meal to finish it (which didn't serve them well, either, I would normally have had a second glass in that time).

My wife ordered an Alsatian pinot gris which was quite a bit more likable, and I asked for another suggestion (why, I don't know) for a dessert wine which ended up with a pretty good sparkling red. But neither was a knockout; both were a little thin by the presumed standards of this kind of dining; I compare them to the paired wines we enjoyed at Trio, where several were among the very best we'd ever tasted of a type, and there's no comparison.

So: there we are. A very nice meal in many ways, some genuine expertise at work in the kitchen, if the style of food appeals to you it's well worth trying-- and yet I can't get through a review without praising it with faint damns. Spring was like one of those movies you see around Oscar time, very well made and grownup and intelligent, and once will probably do me for life.

Looks like I might be in the minority here, but we've always had great service at Spring, not overly fussy but never forgot about us, and pretty good help on the wines too. We've particularly enjoyed their Alsatian Rieslings and Spanish whites. Just another data point.

We have not been in many months now, but each time we have gone at the end of the meal they presented each diner with a tiny cup of liquid chocolate with some ginger in it that my wife goes crazy for. Are they still doing that?