Ritz-Carlton Café

I never thought I would say I miss pomp and circumstance. I’m not really a fan of it to begin with. But there’s definitely some disconnect with dining at the Ritz-Carlton Café now that the once-famous Dining Room has closed its doors. You’re getting similarly delicious food—food worthy of the reputation built over the years by chefs like Fernand Gutierrez, En-Ming Hsu and James Beard–winner Sarah Stegner—but you’re eating it in a hotel lobby, your server is as unengaged as a grizzled coffee-slinger and you’re paying $46 for beef tenderloin. Sure, it’s grass-fed tenderloin from Harris Ranch and the roasted tri-color fingerling potatoes alongside are organic, but the prices simply don’t match the experience.

The most confusing part of the recent shift at the Ritz—after the Dining Room closed a few weeks ago, chef Mark Payne’s “Up Market” menu was unveiled in the café—is that we assumed the change signaled the Ritz was following the trend in contemporary dining. Formal fine dining is a dying tradition, and Chicagoans seeking modern takes on sustainable eats can pay moderate prices for similarly delicious food at dozens of other places in town. So I was shocked that the prices on the Up Market menu were not only just as expensive as the Dining Room’s former menu, but in some cases, they were even higher. That beef tenderloin went for $42 in the Dining Room, and there you got a dome-cloche dining experience, complete with a regal room, silver-cart service and towerlike pastry structures to serve as a reminder that your anniversary (or birthday or promotion) meal was coming to a close.

I’m mostly disappointed the café didn’t adopt a more affordable platform because chef Payne’s food is delicious across the board. Roasted Vidalia onion soup is sweet from caramelized onions and rich from beef shank braised in the broth. An aged Gruyère–topped crouton is perfect for dipping in between slurps. A trio of ceviches achieve three distinctly different flavors, with sweet shrimp in a Vietnamese-ish chili-fish sauce marinade, bright scallops in slick soy-sesame oil and slivers of salmon in lime juice. A mound of prime steak tartare is delicious alone, but the decadence is doubled with a side of waffle-cut potatoes fried in duck fat and drizzled with truffle oil.

And the rich keep getting richer. Heading into second- and main-course territory, there’s a fantastic ricotta gnocchi tossed in duck ragù with briny olives and aged pecorino shards, house-made fettucine in velvety lobster-cream sauce, fall-apart braised short ribs and a crispy- skinned Italian sea bass (branzino) with roasted fennel, smooth Anson Mills grits and a blood-orange sauce dotted with salt-packed capers. It’s all so good you forgive the dated, gilded look of the Ritz, a setting best suited for taking Grandma for afternoon tea.

Grandma would certainly love the new dessert menu as well, packed with docile dishes like banana-bread pudding and chocolate cake. They’re both delicious, but too simple for their $11 price tags. I was nostalgic while eating them—not for the era of milk glass cake stands, but for the spun sugar–topped fanfare that earned the Dining Room’s former pastry chef En-Ming Hsu a spot on the Pastry World Cup team. It just made dinner at the Ritz much more of an event. And it made swallowing the bill a whole lot easier. —Heather Shouse

160 E Pearson St between Michigan Ave and Mies van der Rohe Way (312-573-5223). El: Red to Chicago. Bus: 3, 4 (24 hrs), X4, 10, 26, 125, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 151 (24 hrs). Dinner. Average main course: $36.