For restaurant quality and variety, you couldn’t ask for more than what River North offers. Indeed, you might reasonably ask for less.
The neighborhood is filled–some might argue glutted–with dining choices. Whatever your eating preference might be at a given moment, chances are strong there will be a restaurant to accommodate it.
From Gordon to Hooters (and we trust this will be the first and last time these two eateries share a sentence), River North has it all.
The globe-trotting restaurant patron can select a different ethnic cuisine each night; a tour might include Chinese (Ben Pao), Cuban (Havana), Greek (Papagus), Persian (Reza’s) and Korean (Woo Lae Oak), and choosing among the Indian, Japanese and Thai options would be difficult. Or he could hedge his bets, dining in pan-Asian (Big Bowl) and pan-Hispanic (Mambo Grill) restaurants that offer dishes from many cuisines.
For the less adventurous, there are five top-shelf steakhouses–Chicago Chop House, Gene & Georgetti, Magnum’s, Ruth’s Chris and Smith & Wollensky–and two prime-rib specialists, Lawry’s the Prime Rib and Wildfire.
Sports buffs can shuttle between Harry Caray’s and Michael Jordan’s. Deep-dish pizza aficionados can debate the relative merits of Pizzeria Uno, Pizzeria Due and Lou Malnati’s. You can start with Grapes and end with Zinfandel, and eat well at both extremes.
Even frivolous subgroupings, restaurants ending in the letter O, for instance, result in impressive culinary options: Mango, Spago, Coco Pazzo, Brasserie Jo, Centro, Topolobampo, Lino and Cyrano.
If you prefer the comfort and familiarity of theme restaurants, River North is where you’ll find them. Planet Hollywood, Hard Rock Cafe and Rainforest Cafe — all within a block or two of one another — demonstrate convincingly that mall food is available even when an actual mall is not.
River North also is home to restaurants by Rick Bayless (Frontera Grill) and Wolfgang Puck (Spago), both of whom have been winners of the James Beard Society Chef of the Year award. This year’s co-winner, Jean-Georges Vongerichten of New York, will open a restaurant in River North in January.
River North wasn’t always like this. When Gordon Sinclair opened Gordon (recently named in Bon Appetit magazine as one of the “Ten Best Tried & True Restaurants in America”) in 1976, River North was a dining frontier.
But critical raves drew people to Sinclair’s spot, and in short order River North became a place with dining options. Barry Bursak, another River North pioneer who opened the Granfalloon home furnishings store (which became City in 1982) about the same time Gordon Sinclair started serving food, says the attraction of the area was the same for him as for the restaurateurs.
“Michigan Avenue was full,” says Bursak, who now owns Earth restaurant. “You couldn’t go east, and Lincoln Park and the Loop were fixed. So River North was the only way to go. I’m amazed (the area’s development) took so long.”
These days, Sinclair adds, “I feel like Custer. (The neighborhood) is deep and dense and really congested.”
Indeed, traveling through River North on a weekend evening can be an adventure. The good news is these people are here to dine; the bad news is that most are looking for someplace other than a refined and expensive restaurant such as Gordon.
“You see a lot of shopping bags out there,” Sinclair observes. “Some of them walk in here and ask, `Is this Michael’s restaurant?’ I guess it can be hard to tell the difference between Gordon and Jordan.”
Sinclair says he worries that the area is becoming too crowded for its own good — and certainly too crowded for a jacket-and-tie restaurant’s good. “I think for some people,” Sinclair says, “the thought of coming down to River North, with all the traffic, might be a reason to go somewhere else.”
And yet fine-dining restaurants continue to open and thrive in the area. Suzy Crofton was not dissuaded by fears of oversaturation when she opened Crofton on Wells last year. “I looked on the map, and this is where I wanted to be,” she says. “What I really liked was that the area is right off the Kennedy, right off the Eisenhower; it’s really easy to describe (to customers) how to get here.
“My theory was, when there are more restaurants in an area, it makes it a destination,” she says. “If the area is already thriving, one more isn’t going to hurt, and it might draw even more people to the area.”
River North has closed its share of restaurants too; when chef Michael Kuhn shuttered Farago a couple of years ago, he spoke of the difficulty of running a small, intimate restaurant in a neighborhood filled with 300-seat competitors. But it seems that every time a restaurant closes, another concept springs up in its place.
And the most recent development in River North is the frantic pace of loft conversions and new residential construction. “In the ’70s and ’80s,” Bursak says, “anybody coming to River North had to drive from somewhere else. That’s really changed; people are living here now.”
That’s good news, Bursak predicts, for restaurant owners.
“These people moving into loft condominiums here, they’re not going to Planet Hollywood,” he says. “They’ll go to the small personal restaurants, which will continue to thrive. This is how I always wished the neighborhood would be when I was here in the ’70s. People living and working in this neighborhood. And it’s really happening now.”
