First Bite: The Balanced Kitchen
This Chicago restaurant doesn’t have a massive neon sign announcing its presence on McCormick Boulevard. Nor does it have 200 seats or meat.
What The Balanced Kitchen (6263 N. McCormick Blvd.; 773-463-1085, www.gfreev.com) does have is a menu that’s geared to vegans and vegetarians. It’s organic. And it’s gluten-free.
Step inside the restaurant and you’ll find glass pastry cases displaying fruit tarts, cookies and a chocolate cake. A screen displays the day’s menu. When we visited, there were sandwiches, soups, salads, pizzas, ravioli, milkshakes and more.
Open only a few months, the tiny, serene “green” restaurant is full of recycled materials and bamboo accents. Through the kitchen pass-through window, you’ll probably spot Elizabeth Alper and Zachary Bello, The Balanced Kitchen’s culinary team.
And the food? We thoroughly enjoyed the “bacon”-ranch sandwich ($6.50), a flavorful stack of grilled tofu, tempeh “bacon,” sprouts and a ranch dressing on slices of dense bread, thanks to the lack of the stretchy gluten in wheat loaves. The vegetable soup ($8.50) boasted bright, cooked-just-tender vegetables in a deeply flavored broth. A pretty presentation of raw ravioli ($7.50) — think small-plate portion rather than old-school Italian — sported thinly sliced radishes standing in for the pasta, with a filling made from a nut-based cheese. We finished with a few addictive snickerdoodles and Meyer-lemon cookies (50 cents to $1.50). Some prices may be a bit hard to swallow, but the team deserves kudos for sourcing these sometimes specialized ingredients.
— Judy Hevrdejs
First Bite: Union Pizzeria
The first thing you notice about Union Pizzeria (1245 Chicago Ave., Evanston; 847-475-2400) is the lack of signage, a restaurant name — anything to identify it. Turns out, there is a sign — hand-written, and taped to the door.
Although only open a handful of weeks, Union has become a mob scene, night after night after night. Students in workout sweats, professionals straight from work, parents herding their ducklings — a typical cross-section for a pizza joint in a university town, with a big exception: rather than torn-up leather booths and shakers of Parmesan and a crowd hovering nearby for a table, there’s a waiting area with sunken contemporary sofas and cubed leather ottomans. And instead of a standard brick or metal oven, the behemoth that dominates the room resembles something of a cross between an igloo and Luke Skywalker’s boyhood home on Tatooine — a wood-fired oven nuzzled into a large pale soapstone dome.
The mozzarella appetizer comes dipped in Sicilian sea salt and the side of meatballs does not rest in an everyday red sauce but a startling cold tomato jam. Our baccala (Italian salt cod) was creamy and thick and lightly charred across the top, with somewhat more pureed potato than cod, and definitely more ample than the bread to put it on. Union offers a single big plate each night — gnocchi or lamb stew on Saturday nights, a rich duck ragu on a runny cushion of polenta that made me all cozy and gooey inside.
As for the pizza — considering that geo-dome of culinary godliness in the center of the room, I wish Union spent more time on its crust, which is nice and chewy and thin but doesn’t take advantage of the crispness to be found from a wood-fired oven. Our sausage pizza was sweet with caramelized onions but demolished a little by pools of cheese not entirely melted. Much sturdier was the pie coated in bechamel and topped with quality prosciutto. Considering the upscale ambition, prices are smart: Pizzas are $11-$14; small plates, $3-9; and daily special tops out at $23.
— Christopher Borrelli
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