Powerhouse

Getting to know John Peters’s food is as easy as going in for lunch and ordering his taco: soft flour tortillas filled with the fatless meat of a chicken breast and flanked by a dry pile of brown rice. The dish is so white (literally and culturally) that calling it a taco seems a bit of a stretch. But garnished with some guacamole and a healthy spoonful of the piquant salsa verde, the taco can be surprising: Yes, it’s perhaps the most American taco in Chicago—but it’s not half bad.

Peters (who has cooked at Alinea and Naha, among other places) has made it clear—both on his menu and in conversations with this magazine—that he’s not trying to reinvent the wheel. Hell, he’s not even trying to reinvent brown rice. He’s serving familiar staples of contemporary American cuisine, and he doesn’t care if you’ve had them a hundred times before. Where other chefs may get points for their creativity or the flair of their dining room, Peters has stripped everything, even his ambitions, to its core. Thus, the success of the food rests solely on its execution.

Peters can be this confident because he clearly knows how to cook. His slow-roasted chicken thigh is what all chicken aspires to be: juicy and flavorful, despite chicken’s boring rep. His pork chop is tender enough that the toothsome mustard spaetzel on the plate takes a backseat (a rare thing for good spaetzel). And his pulled-pork sandwich (served at lunch) is a mammoth pile of meat that glistens with soft, sumptuous fat—fat that’s cut by tart pickles and slaw. With dishes as delicious as these, questioning Peters’s ambition (or lack thereof) seems beside the point.

But when you hit his weaker dishes, you’ll wonder why he didn’t try harder. His arctic char is cooked exquisitely, the fish flaking apart into delicious pieces, but the dish is overwhelmed with butter and, thanks to a caper zabaglione, salt. It’s hard not to wish for more balance. The Gulf shrimp are plump and juicy, but they have a suspicious sandiness about them. His slow-roasted pheasant is served with sage stuffing, brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes and a cranberry gastrique. It’s obviously meant to be a play on Thanksgiving (the potatoes are even topped with marshmallow), but the interpretation is too literal, resulting in a dish that feels commonplace and boring instead of witty.

It doesn’t help matters that for a restaurant so self-assured, there are still some rough edges. Service was often slow and aloof. Sauces were occasionally left off plates. Desserts were so consistently disappointing that they barely warrant mentioning (the sweet-potato doughnuts being the one exception). And every five minutes or so a train roars by, sending the dining room into a mild rumble.

Although, if you think about it, the train rattling above you is somewhat appropriate: Nothing is as unpretentious, familiar or (to a certain degree) dependable as taking the train. And at Powerhouse, the food can be that way, too. You just have to be willing to go in that direction.