Flavor forecast

Bite-size desserts

1 Bite-size desserts
Chef Shawn McClain’s South Loop Custom House (500 S Dearborn St, 312-523-0200) isn’t your typical steakhouse: Modern design and seasonal preps rule. Fittingly, then, pastry chef Elissa Narrow goes for subtlety over gluttony for her endings, with a menu of “sweet bites” that includes a daily cupcake, petite ice-cream sandwiches, a handful of caramel corn with candied pecans and a candy bar that, if mass-marketed, could put Mars under.

2 Locally grown produce
The menu at Lula Café (2537 N Kedzie Blvd, 773-489-9554) doesn’t overload diners with details that Klug Farm grew the spinach, Greg Gunthorp raised the chicken and City Farm pulled the beets just this morning. If it did, it’d be eight pages long: Nearly everything that can be purchased locally is. The $24, three-course, Monday-night farm dinners showcase a different farmer each week.

3 Organic produce
Bleeding Heart Bakery’s Michelle Garcia moved her baking operations to Belmont Avenue and shifted the focus of her Chicago Avenue storefront to organic savory dishes. Now as Painted Lady (2018 W Chicago Ave, 773-278-3638), the casual café serves salads, sandwiches and pizza made of 100 percent organic ingredients and sports a chalkboard explaining that, because everything is pesticide-free, menu prices are a bit higher than at similar spots. Apparently, it’s not easy (or cheap) being green.

4 Small plates/tapas/mezze
For small-plates places like Le Passage, which recently revamped into the Drawing Room (937 N Rush St, 312-255-0022) to try to save themselves, letting diners try a bit of this and a bit of that is working. Which means you don’t have to decide between Shawn McClain’s crab cakes and his braised pork belly. There’s room for both.

5 Specialty sandwiches
Offering around 100 varieties of sandwiches at the newer Wicker Park location (1938 W Division St, 773-235-1006) of West Loop–based Jerry’s was just the signature stamp needed to carry the handheld creations into the dinner hour. The possibilities are endless—and range from chipotle-mango chutney to grilled asparagus—and the extensive American craft beer list and the spot’s airy feel add to the appeal.

6 Craft/artisan/microbrew beer
Piece, Rock Bottom, Two Brothers, Flossmoor, Three Floyds and, yes, even Goose Island (contrary to the notion that it’s only mass market now) all produce some amazingly crafted beers locally. So while tourists may still think of us as the land of Old Style, these area brewers bust their asses to put Chicago on the beer map. Support them—drink up.

7 Sustainable seafood
If you’re reading a menu that boasts Chilean sea bass or halibut, the chef probably isn’t really into serving sustainable seafood. At North Pond (2610 N Cannon Dr, 773-477-5845), Bruce Sherman uses options like sweet Maine shrimp, but won’t serve monkfish, because “Maine shrimp is wild and fished sustainably,” he says. “And I love monkfish, but I haven’t used it for at least three years because it’s been overfished. So I’m giving it time.”

8 Grass-fed items
When David Burke’s Primehouse (616 N Rush St, 312-660-6000) opened last year, we heard a lot about how a Black Angus bull named Prime is the ancestral stud for all the cattle raised to be steaks at this swank spot. And since good genes shouldn’t be undermined, the cattle are grass-fed, which results in both leaner beef that’s higher in omega-3 fatty acids and less need for antibiotics for the cows.

9 Energy-drink cocktails
At megaclubs like Excalibur/Vision (632 N Dearborn St, 312-266-1944), the couple thousand people who come on an average weekend night—like that guy screaming over your shoulder for a “vodka Red Bull, dude”—consume so many jolted-up cocktails that the owners decided to invest in Roaring Lion’s bag-in-a-box product. It can be hooked directly into the beverage gun alongside club soda and cola.

Salts

10 Salts
Some chefs prefer pepper, others have a thing for salt. Randy Zweiban of Nacional 27 (325 W Huron St, 312-664-2727) is the latter, using vanilla sea salt to crust chocolate wafers for a dessert, sprinkling black-olive sea salt over olive oil–poached tuna and pepping up pan-roasted striped bass with the coral-colored Hawaiian pink sea salt. Home cooks can do the same with salts from local company Lot’s Wyfe (lotswyfe.com).

11 Ethnic fusion cuisine
When chef Maneet Chauhan was in culinary school, many of the other students cooked Latin American food of their heritage, teaching Chauhan some recipes in exchange for her lessons in Indian staples. These days, at her River North restaurant Vermilion (10 W Hubbard St, 312-527-4060), Chauhan combines the flavors of both cuisines in dishes like garam masala–crusted Argentine beef with mango rice and Peruvian-style yucca cake.

Flatbreads

12 Flatbreads
The endless options of toppings you can pile on crispy flatbreads make them a good menu-perusing starter. At Sepia (123 N Jefferson St, 312-441-1920), the flatbread combo of bacon, pears and blue cheese has been so popular since the restaurant opened last summer that it remains on the menu, now joined by an option that pairs roasted spaghetti squash with plump and briny white anchovies.

13 Martinis/flavored martinis
They may be climbing the ranks as a national trend, but martinis are no new news in the Chi. Especially at Wicker Park stalwart Silver Cloud (1700 N Damen Ave, 773-489-6212), which has been serving a dozen fruit flavors (and one dirty) for years. Sweet fiends are fanatical about the Smore’tini, complete with graham cracker–crust rim.

14 Mojitos
Restaurateur Jerry Kleiner banked on Nuevo Latino cuisine to fill his 400-seat Carnivale (702 W Fulton Mkt, 312-850-5005), which he opened more than a year ago. So far so good, but we think much success is due to the popular mojitos, which come in classic lime and raspberry, plus mango on request.

15 Asian entrée salad
Entrée salads typically run the gamut from snooze-inducing chicken Caesar to the ubiquitous combo of pecan, cranberry, blue cheese. SushiSamba Rio (504 N Wells St, 312-595-2300) adds interest to the typical cobb by Asianizing it: Miso is slathered onto the chicken before it’s grilled, quail egg replaces standard egg, and a soy-ginger vinaigrette cuts the richness of bacon and avocado chunks.

16 Pomegranates
A handful of bars and clubs use pomegranate-flavored liquors, but their creations tend to be cloyingly sweet. The real trend is a move toward straight pomegranate juice in cocktails. Mixologists at Violet Hour (1520 N Damen Ave, 773-252-1500) make a bitters with fresh pomegranate then add a few drops of it to Pisco that’s been frothed with egg white to form a drink dubbed Northern Lights.

17 Asian appetizers
It’s not much of a surprise to find Asian starters at Asian restaurants, so the surveyed chefs must expect to see even more Asian ingredients on non-Asian menus. Case in point: Luxbar (18 E Bellevue Pl, 312-642-3400), home of killer fried chicken and juicy burgers, does sesame-crusted seared tuna with soy sauce, wasabi and pickled ginger and serves it with a shrimp spring roll and lime-soy dipping sauce.

18 Microdistilled/artisanal liquors
Chicago’s North Shore isn’t just home to Paris Hilton wanna-bes—it’s also the birthplace of some stunning artisanal vodka and gin. North Shore Distillery’s Rhuginger No. 6—supersmooth gin infused with rhubarb and ginger—is poured at Viet Bistro (1344–46 W Devon Ave, 773-465-5720) while the self-explanatory Tahitian Vanilla Vodka can be found at Lumen (839 W Fulton Mkt, 312-733-2222) and Tavern at the Park (130 E Randolph St, 312-552-0070).

19 Organic wines
Although Michael Altenberg’s popular pizzeria Crust (2056 W Division St, 773-235-5511) sports organic certification for its food, the designation doesn’t extend to alcohol. Still, you’ll find a handful of wines made from pesticide-free fruit, including Parducci Pinot Noir and Borgo Pinot Grigio.

20 Specialty beer (e.g., seasonal, fruit, spice/herb)
All of the aforementioned local breweries put out seasonals (wheats in summer, Oktoberfests in fall, heavy barrel-aged stuff in winter, etc.). Since they’re made in limited quantities, they’re more likely to be on draft than in bottles; the taps at most better bars should offer a seasonal. The big boys like Leinenkugel’s and Michelob do fruit and spice brews, but trendy or not, we suggest avoiding those at all costs.