David Burke's Primehouse wins AOL's Best Fine Dining Restaurant in Chicago! Click here to read more
"Refreshingly innovative", the B.R. Guest gang's ultramodern New American steakhouse in The James Hotel rises "head and shoulders above" others of its ilk, serving up "excellent quality" beef dry-aged on-premises, plus David Burke's signature dishes from his Park Avenue Caf" days; there's "not only great meat" "Caesar salads made tableside add a "nice bit of entertainment" while the "well-executed supporting dishes" offer "enough of a twist to make us come again."
Theorists who believe in an ever-expanding universe might point to Chicago's steakhouse scene as confirmation. A city crammed with high-quality beef emporia keeps adding worthy newcomers without ever pushing out any of its established operations. Apparently, Chicago's appetite for beef is, like the cosmos, infinite.
The last noteworthy steakhouse to shut down was Eli's the Place for Steak, and that was because its landlord reclaimed the building.
And so it is impossible to predict anything but success for David Burke's Primehouse, a 10-week-old steakhouse in River North's new James Hotel. A good-looking restaurant with sharp service and an ambitious menu, Primehouse is the latest Chicago concept by the B.R. Guest group, the folks behind Blue Water Grill in Chicago and owners of the James. They're in partnership with acclaimed chef David Burke, best known currently for DavidBurke & Donatella restaurant in New York.
Burke has enjoyed success in Chicago before; he was the creative force behind Park Avenue Grill (which had a respectable seven-year-run here) and Smith & Wollensky (eight years and counting). Indeed, a few items from Burke's previous restaurants have made their way onto the Primehouse menu.
But the restaurant is, foremost, a steakhouse, and steaks are where Primehouse shines. The restaurant features prime beef that's dry-aged (a process that is more expensive than wet-aging, which is what nearly every other steakhouse does). Below the dining room is the restaurant's salt-lined aging room (Burke says the salt adds flavor and inhibits bacterial growth), where the steaks (filets excepted) spend about 28 days before heading for the kitchen.
If you're a real fan of aging (which tenderizes the meat and gives the flavor a "bleu cheese" tang that not every steak-lover appreciates), try one of the 40-day steaks, which are cuts that have aged even longer. They're not always available, but I was blown away by the 40-day ribeye I sampled--one of the leanest, yet tastiest steaks I've ever had.
Another good option is the Porterhouse for One, a 25-ounce cut that's somewhat less daunting than the 3-pound monstrosities one finds elsewhere. It's also delicious, the filet side of the cut remarkably tender and the strip side toothsome and packed with beefy flavor.
Steaks are served with two of the restaurant's signature steak sauces, and for a couple dollars more there are other sauces available. The sauces are fine, but why would you want to adulterate the flavor of top-quality beef? Skip 'em all, I say.
If you're not up for beef, Primehouse has much with which to tempt you, though execution is less reliable with these dishes than with the steaks. The fanciful lobster steak, in which claw and tail meat are formed, with some butter-pureed lobster, into a 3-inch tall hunk, was accompanied by a mountain range of fries. All well and good, but the plate's third element, a cloying sauce of caramelized honey and vinegars, enveloped the lobster and was drizzled all over the fries. The sauce was inescapable and grew tiresome rather quickly.
Starters are full of style and creativity. A sextet of dumplings offered an interesting take on surf and turf; half the dumplings filled with a lemony lobster mousse, and the other half containing oxtail meat and foie gras. Both were exotically rich on the tongue. Tuna and salmon tartare, a dish that dates back to Burke's earliest days, was as good as I remembered: twin disks of tartare, one atop the other, crowned by a thin layer of creme fraiche. A trio of sauces--ginger, curry and miso-tomato vinaigrette--gave the dish contemporary accents.
Caesar salad gets a tableside presentation, a nice bit of theater for a classic dish, but I wish the preparer had not been quite so generous with the garlic. Lobster bisque, accented with shredded lobster and diced apple, arrived with a long lobster-mousse spring roll straddling the bowl. The soup itself was smooth and sweet, but the spring roll was so salty it overwhelmed everything else.
I like the offbeat presentation of crab meat, bundled in Japanese pretzels, fried tempura-style and sprinkled with mustard seeds; only an excess of oil kept this concoction from being a hit.
Because it's the James Hotel's only restaurant, Primehouse serves breakfast and lunch daily, and weekend brunch. The morning menu has a few eggs Benedict variations, homemade granola and lots of smoothies; lunch includes some smaller-sized steaks, including a very good petite steak frites, and a first-rate burger.
The killer chocolate-layer cake leads the list of worthy desserts. I like the gimmick behind the Kickin' Donuts, in which a Chinese take-out carton-full of doughnut holes is served with squeeze bottles of sauces to be injected. And I enjoyed the made-to-order "rack of cookies," a sextet of fresh cookies served in an English toast rack, paired with a miniature vanilla shake. Very cute.
The dining room is contemporary and neutral, the cream walls trimmed with dark wood. Tables are covered with pebbled leather, putting me in mind of a steamrollered basketball, and spacious booths are clad in soft leather as well. In other words, dead cows provide the decor as well as the food.
But the star of the restaurant is very much alive; that would be Prime 207L, the premium Black Angus bull owned by the restaurant. Prime lives on a Kentucky ranch where he helps with, um, production. Nice work if you can get it, though it probably makes for some awkward family reunions.
Just when you think Chicago has reached a critical mass of steak houses, along come three more. Two are hardened city dwellers, courtesy of well-known chefs, and the third-in the northwest suburbs- arrives via a sizzling West Coast-based chain.
David Burke knows the value of a good gimmick. The beefy chef has been photographed standing beside his magnificent $250,000 Black Angus bull- named Prime 207L- which is diligently at work at Creekstone Farms in Kentucky, siring steers destined for the Himalayan-salt-tiled dry-aging room of David Burke’s Primehouse. A major figure on the Manhattan scene- and creative force behind the Smith & Wollensky steak-house chain- Burke was last seen here in 1995 to launch Park Avenue Café. In the weeks following Primehouse’s March opening, Burke was often on hand, but in the long run, Jason Miller will run the kitchen while Burke attends to his NYC restaurants.
Housed in the splashy new James Hotel on Rush (previously Lenox Suites), Primehouse is the second foray into the Chicago scene for the New York restaurant group B.R. Guest (Blue Water Grill was the first). The modern space is furnished with dark brown leather-covered chairs and tables smartly wrapped in fitted red leather. Look up and there are white linen ceiling shades and blackened nickel chandeliers. Black-and-white pencil drawings of corkscrews adorn earth-toned walls- a good sign that conviviality abounds here.
Burke likes to put things on a stick, from the lollipop of olive brine and blue cheese garnishing the “deconstructed and dirty” vodka martini, to a dessert “tree” of cheesecake lollipops. In additional to the martini lollipop, Eben Klemm, an MIT trained chemist and the B.R. Guest “director of cocktail development,” also created a Manhattan made with leather-infused Maker’s mark bourbon and a gooey bitters-and maraschino gumdrop. Yep, it’s gimmicks galore, and while the silly cheesecake conceit looks like the table prize from a bridal shower, the two cocktails are actually terrific. And no, the Manhattan doesn’t taste like a saddle.
There are clear New York steak-house influences on Burke’s menu. For one, this place dry-ages the beef on site. Then there’s the eggy popover presented in a little copper pan to each diner, similar to those at Manhattan’s BLT Steak a fact commented on by the new York-savvy diners at the next table. The complimentary bottled steak sauces brought to the table are another Gotham touch, although one has so much horseradish that it tastes like stray shrimp cocktail stuff, and the other, named 207L Steak Sauce-no bull- smacks a zesty Texas barbecue number. Other sauces include the French-style three peppercorn and the béarnaise, available for $2. As I waited, drooling for my prime steak to arrive, I wondered: Why all these sauces if the air from the Himalayan salt in the drying room is supposed to make the steaks so good.
Well, after multiple visits to Primehouse, I can say if you hit the place on a night when the grill man gets the beef right, sauces of any stripe are beside the point. But on two visits, the steaks at my table were best overcooked and at worst almost burnt on the bottom-one sad porterhouse approached the consistency of leather. That’s the time to bring on the sauces, or send the beef back.
The one visit when the steaks came out properly cooked turned into a beefeater’s paradise, although any influence from the salt walls in the aging room is debatable- seems as though a sprinkle of salt at the table would do the same job. Besides a porterhouse, a bone-in New York strip, and the wonderfully marbled “Kentucky” rib eye, there is a strange filet mignon, the bone-in “South Side” filet. (Our waiter told us it was named in honor of Chicago’s stockyard heritage and that only two can be taken from a steer.) Lightly dry-aged for five days, it comes from high up on the hip and with a massive bone adding flavor too the imposingly thick filet. Then the kitchen got it right, it was easily the most flavorful filet I’ve had at a steakhouse; the unfortunate night they botched the cooking, the result was no better than chewy pot roast.
If you prefer seafood, try the Maine lobster steak. Part of a one-pound lobster is turned into a tasty mousse embedded with chunks of claw and tail meat, and finished with candied lemon and a stack of shoestrings flavored with Moroccan spices. Or if steaks and lobster just don’t give you the cholesterol buzz you want, go for the crackling whole pork shank served with punchy firecracker applesauce- an imposing hunk of pig that you can also find at Smith & Wollensky.
Some of the Primehouse appetizers are very good, beginning with a Caesar salad made in a tableside show- unless you draw a booth where there is no maneuvering room for the salad cart, in which case you have to crane your neck and peer down the aisle to see it. In any event, order it with crab croutons ($5 extra), and you have a fine start. The topnotch cold shellfish platter is a reasonable $38 for a one one-pound lobster, two kinds of oysters, two fish tartares, and more goodies with four dipping sauces. Lobster also shows up in a fine bisque (except ours wasn’t hot enough) with green apple essence and a foot-long lobster spring roll on the side.
Like those cheesecake lollipops, the banana sundae also comes with a banana fritter on a stick. I haven't seen this much impaling since Braveheart. The “rack o’ cookies” was ho-hum, perked a bit by vanilla mini-shakes for all. By far the best dessert is the “slice of prime,” a magnificent multi-layered chocolate cake with s’mores ice cream, stabbed with a Texas longhorn’s head- made of chocolate, of course. A friend marveled that the cake was so intensely chocolaty it made his spine shudder. Service seemed random, varying from polished to inept, but a properly extensive steak-house wine list is on track. After that leathery Manhattan I gravitated toward a six-ounce carafe of Spanish Viscarra Ribera del Duero Tempranillo ($13). |
Creative starters, desserts join buzz-worthy beef
Prime beef is easy to corral in Chicago, but David Burke's Primehouse separates itself from the herd with meat that is dry-aged on site in a salt-tiled meat locker. The restaurant invested $250,000 in its own Black Angus bull — named Prime — whose job is to father all the beef served in the dining room.
Chef/partner David Burke says the salt aging imparts subtle flavor throughout the beef, and that Prime delivers well-marbled offspring. But is all the hype a bunch of prize-winning bull?
It's not. New York import Mr. Burke delivers not only a superior steak but also takes a couple of star turns with signature dishes like angry lobster and cheesecake lollipops.
Located in River North's James Chicago Hotel, Primehouse is classy enough for business lunches or dinners or a prelude to a night of clubbing on Rush Street. The food does all the talking in this bare-bones contemporary dining room.
Angry lobster appetizer ($18, dinner only) in chile oil, candied lemon, basil and garlic is sawed apart and artfully reassembled, for display, on a bed of tiny nails. We quickly devoured it.
Surf and turf dumplings ($10.50), stuffed with foie gras and oxtail or with lemon-tinged lobster mousse, are delicious. If you crave foie gras, hurry: It will be replaced this summer when the City Council's goose-liver ban goes into effect.
I plan to console myself with crab cakes ($14 dinner appetizer or lunch entrée), a standout in a very crowded field. The crab cake is lined with tiny pretzel sticks, making it resemble a raft, and served with mango vinaigrette, poppyseed honey, and cucumber and kumquat salad.
Kobe beef sashimi ($15) is dramatic on a brick of Himalayan salt with truffle sauce and crisp mushroom chips. You won't fill up on it, but what's there is luxe.
At lunch I tried the petite filet ($18). When I'd called the restaurant earlier, I had been told it was lightly aged. It is not, but this is still a fabulous piece of meat. Truffle oil and Asiago cheese turn basic fries into steak-worthy potatoes.
The New York sirloin, aged for 30 days ($31 lunch, $35 dinner), is equally rich and more flavorful than others. Steak should always be this good.
For $2 you can add three-peppercorn sauce or blue cheese mousse, but I wouldn't. It'd be a shame to gild these lilies.
Black Angus oxtail pot roast ($26 dinner) can compete with West Town Tavern's (1329 W. Chicago Ave.) signature dish. The meat — actually beef — is tender, the sauce intense and the sunny-side-up quail eggs on top are a clever steak-and-eggs touch. But you'll have to shred the meat off a big, gnarled bone, so save this for casual get-togethers.
Organic roasted chicken ($24, dinner only) is lightly seasoned and remarkably juicy. It's served with smoky whipped potatoes with chorizo (as a side, $5 lunch, $7 dinner).
Lobster whipped potatoes ($5, lunch only) are tasty but don't look appetizing; the top swims in orange-colored oil.
For dessert, cheesecake lollipops ($5 lunch, $15 dinner) are like tangy, high-end truffles. At lunch, three are planted in a glass of sugar; at dinner, nine are dramatically displayed on a "tree" decorated with herbs.
Prime chocolate cake with graham chip ice cream ($5 lunch, $10 dinner) is a winner. Sorbets are homemade but lack pizzazz ($8 for three flavors). Warm rack of cookies ($9 lunch, $10 dinner) seemed a sure thing, but the toffee-pecan cookies were bland.
Service at both visits needed some tweaking. At lunch, several staff members bombarded us with inquiries about how we were doing; at dinner, idle waitstaff loitered within feet of our table. However, the routine touches — napkins folded for those who leave the table and chairs pushed in, for example — signal that Primehouse is aiming for executive-class service.
Chicago must be the most steak-house-friendly city on the planet. We've lost count of these puppies, but no matter. David Burke, who cut his meat-savvy teeth with the Smith & Wollensky Restaurant Group, thinks there's room for one more: David Burke's Primehouse. To differentiate his new chop shop from all others, Burke calls it a modern-day steak house. That means a place with dry-aged steaks and an old-school feel, but "some more exciting appetizers than you would get at a classic steak house." Judging by the pretzel-crusted crab cakes with pineapple slaw and poppy seed honey, it looks as though Burke is on to something.
Shell Shock Star chef David Burke is internationally known for his whimsical food at New York's davidburke & donatella. But when David Burke's Primehouse opens on Friday 17, he'll share the limelight with Prime, the $250,000 bull he bought to "father" all of the meat used in the restaurant. Burke swears it's not just a stunt: He promises that the fruits of Prime's loins- dry-aged at the restaurant in a salt-tiled room- will be more flavorful and less hormone-laden than the competition. The menu won't stop at New York sirloin and petite filet mignon, however "Angry lobster" and cheesecake lollipops ensure that even if Prime is the star of this show, Burke is still calling the shots. |
