North Pond, the rustic yet refined iconic Chicago restaurant open in Lincoln Park since 1998, whose defining chef departed after an award-winning career spanning 20 years, has found new confidence and curiosity through the extraordinary lived experience of executive chef César Murillo.
Murillo has perhaps become best known as a contestant on the reality television series “Top Chef” just this year. I didn’t watch the season, but the chef popped up instead on my social media feeds, alongside Oriana Kruszewski, the legendary local Chinese American farmer who began by growing Asian pear trees in her backyard in Skokie more than 30 years ago.
He calls her his mentor, as is clearly evident with his own rooftop garden that’s grown as wild and whimsical as his cuisine.
“When I started in 2020, we weren’t even open and it was just craziness,” Murillo said. “I felt like my initial job was to get us out of that.”
The menu then had a lot of French-inspired food, so that’s what he kept doing.
I asked Murillo what North Pond is now, five tumultuous years into his tenure.
“If I had to pick one word, it would just be magical,” he said.
Indeed, when I visited for a late summer brunch and dinner, the park and pond set the scene, lush with life. Restaurant owner Richard Mott commissioned architect Nancy Warren long ago, who transformed the former ice-skating shelter into an arts and crafts movement refuge. They captured that historic reactionary moment against industrialization in hand-hewn stone and timber.
“That’s how the restaurant was designed, and that’s how the menu was designed,” Murillo said.
Nearly 30 years later — from opening chef Mary Ellen Díaz, to James Beard Award-winning chef Bruce Sherman, to chef Tim Vidrio — Murillo carries on that ethos.
It’s only relatively recently that he’s explored Mexican dishes somewhat inspired by his lineage. I highly recommend going for brunch and dinner. The former is a fine-dining deal with three courses for $59. The latter includes five courses, where the chef sets the first three, but for the last two, you choose your own adventure.
The melon was the first course that will probably have changed by the time you go. Mine was a coastal summer escape in a bowl, by way of a drift along an imaginary Korean, Mexican and Midwestern coastline. A cool cantaloupe and lemongrass soup floated around a pristine Busan crab salad and soft fennel ribbons, topped by a golden buñuelo with a black lime finish and coconut powder dusting, as well a bright, but restrained hint of jalapeño heat.
The dish was reminiscent of the one that got Murillo his job at North Pond.
“It was a chilled corn gazpacho with king crab, beautiful Sungold tomatoes and a little pistachio cream,” he said.
But his beautiful buñuelo de viento, the fragile rosette variation of the celebratory snack, comes from a poignant past in poverty.
“I used to eat so much cereal, and I suppose that’s where that comes from,” said the chef. “I don’t have that many childhood memories.”
Murillo was born in Chihuahua City, Mexico, where his parents had pieced together a corrugated metal shelter for their family to live. When he was 4 years old, they brought him and his two older sisters to the U.S. on visitor visas.
“Then we just overstayed,” said Murillo. “So for 22 years, I was living here illegally.”
He grew up just outside of Dallas.
“I didn’t grow up eating a lot of good food,” said the chef. “My mom would make a pot of beans, and that’s what you ate the whole week, until the next week when she made the next pot of beans.”
Somehow, Murillo made it into culinary school, despite an initial rejection due to his immigration status. He moved to Chicago for an internship at Frontera Grill in 2010. They offered him a job, so he worked there for nearly two years.
Eventually, the young chef followed some of the best ingredients to their source in California, before moving back to Texas.
“I still see it as an advantage, the fact that I didn’t have good food growing up, because when I became an adult, I was able to almost experience food for the first time,” Murillo said. “I still remember trying fresh-squeezed orange juice for the first time, and I was 21 years old in San Francisco.”
One summer, he emailed the restaurant Grace, then seven months old in the West Loop, asking to stage. They said yes, and offered him a job on the fifth day.“One of my biggest moments as a cook was when I was promoted to sous chef at Grace at 24 and still an illegal immigrant,” said Murillo, who now has a green card. “I was kind of like, holy crap, I’m in charge of American citizens.”
That moment led to three Michelin stars under critically acclaimed chef Curtis Duffy, and the intensely present style at North Pond.
“It’s not like cooking from the past,” Murillo said. “It’s cooking from what’s happening now.”
The quesadilla may be the chef’s most emblematic dish at this moment. An exquisitely thin and crisped tortilla, handmade with artful swirls of blue and yellow heirloom corn masa, held meticulously melted J2K cheddar from Indiana and featherweight puffs of house-made chicharrón, garnished with glorious petals from the garden above. A silky smooth pool of salsa de chile morita further defined the second course as a creation of his own.
The executive chef, however, has also created a kitchen where he mentors collaboration. The scallop Murillo credits to his chef de cuisine John Brandon. A fat, sweet and briny Hokkaido scallop, hit judiciously with berbere spice, sits on top of a supple buckwheat crêpe, stuffed with an earthy chanterelle mushroom jam, over a buttery pickled Thai banana blossom-infused beurre blanc. It’s a delicious and thoughtful third course that shows the culinary similarities and differences between the crêpe and tortilla.
The wagyu, which I chose for the fourth course, is a dish Murillo attributes to his youngest cook, Zoe Thatcher. A beefy wagyu strip loin comes with a tender braised cheek, sauteed enoki and maitake from Four Star Mushrooms in the Kinzie Industrial corridor, plus charred purple cabbage two ways, as a soy-glazed steak and a purée.
The opera cake, my fifth and final course at dinner, is a lyrical play by pastry chef Johan Orellana on the original French gâteau Opéra, which would have had my chefs at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris fuming. Here it’s unrecognizable with unsanctioned tart nectarine curls hiding a lovely coffee sponge cake layered with chocolate ganache. Old school chefs would have absolutely approved, however, of the clean quenelle of a coffee gelato, made with En Masse beans, a nod to Orellana’s Honduran heritage, by way of Metric Coffee in Fulton Market.
A seasonal nonalcoholic lemonade at brunch includes those nectarines in a stone fruit base that needed much more sweetness, but it’s still fun, finished with a fluffy lemon foam.
For brunch, I chose more adventurously with rich rewards. The pimento toast piled plump poached lobster over sharp pimento cheese and under a spicy fennel salad, all on a burnished potato loaf slice. The ocean trout, prepared perfectly in duck fat and bejeweled in a house-made furikake, flaked flawlessly into a smoked corn succotash. The fantastical Arnold Palmer dessert paired the flavors of lemonade and tea with a chocolate cake layered with an aromatic yuzu curd and dark ganache, against a subtly smoky lapsang souchong ice cream.
Bartender Kat Alexandria creates the drinks. Their Lillet Pad is the cutest complex cocktail I’ve had in a long time, with a teeny nasturtium leaf lily pad dotted with a tiny clear glucose water droplet. The drink itself is strong, but balanced with sweet Lillet Blanc, sparkling wine and passion fruit liqueur.
A nonalcoholic garden gimlet refresher starts classically as a limeade, but with a house-made lemon oleo saccharum and an alluring seasonal bouquet of herbs from the rooftop garden.
I wish the restaurant offered just drinks and snacks in addition to the tasting menus, especially the warm potato roll with fennel seed and summer tomato butter with cherry tomato and tomato dust.
The service staff was excellent, genuinely friendly and casually knowledgeable at brunch and dinner, in the coveted year-round front room and seasonal dog-friendly patio, with the idyllic views of the namesake pond.
Meanwhile, Murillo and his team are already working together on the next season with curiosity and clarity.
North Pond
2610 N. Cannon Drive (for drop-offs, use 2600 N. Lakeview Ave., then follow the sign east and go under the bridge to the restaurant)
773-477-5845
Open: Dinner from 5:30 p.m., Thursday and Sunday until 8 p.m., Friday and Saturday until 9 p.m.; Brunch on Sunday from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
Prices: $134 (dinner), $59 (brunch), $11 (garden herb gimlet refresher), $16 (Lillet Pad cocktail); Note, no mobile payments accepted, including Apple Pay
Sound: OK (55 to 70 dB, outside and inside, respectively)
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible park path to restaurant, with ramp and restrooms on one level
Tribune rating: Outstanding to excellent, 3.5 of 4 stars
Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.
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