The
pollo alla montecarlo
at Phil Stefani’s 437 Rush is a very nice dish. Much like a saltimbocca, if you used fontina cheese with the prosciutto, added rosemary instead of sage and threw in a bed of spinach for good measure.
It goes for $17 at lunch, but for the next week, you can enjoy it with a substantial appetizer and a rich dessert for a total of $22. And you won’t be griping about portions; after my lunch, I toted leftovers back to the employee fridge.
And that’s why I love Chicago’s Restaurant Week, back for the fourth year and featuring more than 200 participating restaurants dishing up three-course lunches ($22) and dinners ($33 and/or $44). It gives me a chance to experience restaurants at a fraction of what I’d ordinarily pay.
Now, anybody can make money on a $22 lunch by watering down the soup and shrinking the salad, but every restaurant I’ve visited in the last three years has played fair. Which is smart, because all any good restaurant wants is a chance to win more business. Lure patrons in with discount prices, treat them right and maybe they’ll be back, paying full fare, down the road.
437 Rush certainly made a persuasive case for a repeat visit. One of the appetizers included half-dollar-sized coins of baby eggplant, nominally parmigiana style but without the heavy breading common to inferior versions. Instead there was a bit of melted cheese and a robust, bright tomato sauce. I could have spent the visit eating just this. The second entrée was lasagna alla Bolognese, stuffed with a surfeit of ground meat and topped with a tomato sauce enhanced with a touch of cinnamon.
The dessert course included a tiramisu that reminded me why this dish was
the
dessert of the early ’90s (any snobs out there who want to mock tiramisu, please wait outside), and a nifty turn on cannoli that stuffed the sweetened ricotta cheese into oversized phyllo-dough cornets, rather than the traditional thick, open-ended shell. At this point of the meal I was in favor of anything lighter, so I devoured the cannoli with gratitude.
When the Chicago Convention & Tourism Bureau presented Chicago’s inaugural Restaurant Week in 2008, all of 36 restaurants joined in. This year, there are more than 20 participating restaurants in the suburbs alone.
The bureau’s website,
eatitupchicago.com
, lists participating restaurants and their menus, plus links to
opentable.com
for online reservations. The eatitupchicago website is a little balky, often crashing after two or three restaurant searches, but in general it’s extremely useful.
The only other glitch is that a handful of restaurants neglected to put a price on their dinner menus. This wasn’t an issue in years past, when only one dinner price was available. But this year, dinners can be $33 or $44, and a few restaurants forgot to add their prices. When in doubt, call ahead.
The telephone can be your friend in other ways too. When the opentable.com site says a certain time or date is sold out, calling the restaurant is a good strategy. Most restaurants hold back a couple of tables in case the King of Spain arrives unannounced, and late cancellations are always a possibility. You could get lucky.
Restaurant Week runs through Feb. 27, but already a couple of restaurants have announced that they will extend their deals a bit longer. Benny’s Chop House and Naha, both in River North, will offer their Restaurant Week menus on Feb. 28, and Mercadito, a Mexican restaurant also in River North, will feature its menus through March 6.
