The last time I reviewed restaurants professionally, back in the early ’80s, so-called Continental cuisine — the likes of Steak Diane and Tournedos Rossini — was still around, Thai food hadn’t yet made it to suburbia, nouvelle cuisine wasn’t yet old hat and a rich pate didn’t whip up an after-morning tsunami in my digestive system.
So I took my seat at the Contemporary American restaurant Blackbird with trepidation. You get rusty at the art of fine dining. For starters, I neglected to warn my companion that we visit restaurants secretly; he blew our cover by inquiring if our reservation was in the name of the Tribune.
Oh well. Maybe we got a little extra service, but at $50 per person, you’d better get servers who provide masterful attention and breezy, ad-lib interchanges.
A lot hasn’t changed. Menus vary, quality is unpredictable and some chefs are better than others. But there is a reliable thrill to this kind of dining, a sense that diner and the staff are in it together to make something special of the evening. The great secret to dining out not on a budget is that every meal can be a bit of improvisational theater: More experimental, fun-loving diners have a better time.
“I tried that, it’s wonderful,” a friendly, middle-aged matron next to us intoned when my “cured foie gras with caramelized apple puree, brioche, watercress, zante currants and aged balsamic” arrived. This sort of eating is an adventure, like going to Europe on the Concorde. Exchanging experiences is part of the ride.
The ride at Blackbird is smooth and ultrachic, maybe too much so: The plain pastel walls and glass window front seem more like a house in Malibu than a restaurant in the otherwise gentrified factory area along West Randolph Street. But despite the pretension in the air, the dishes at Blackbird all look like flawless works of art and often taste like something celestial. The foie gras, for instance, proved to be dollops of a satiny substance that, were you blindfolded, you might swear was some sort of ice cream.
Back in my day, braised beef short rib was something you bought at a diner. Today it’s haute cuisine, and Blackbird’s dish boasts slightly seared meat resting atop a spicy potato hash.
Our desserts — a banana cream tart and a chocolate ganache — sounded better than they tasted. But then they came after a delicious trio of sorbets and at the end of a meal and an evening that began with an artfully carved circle of potato stuffed with cream and caviar, one of those little complimentary touches suggesting you’re a cherished guest.
