Cheap Eats: Opera

By Erin in Food on Apr 11, 2006 6:13PM

Chicagoist believes in very few things and among them are a good scotch before dinner, steaks should always be cooked medium rare and every higher-end restaurant needs to have a night or two when they make their wares accessible to the people at large.

Take, for instance, Chicagoist. Chicagoist is broke, people. The kind of broke that means when our girlfriends made arrangements for all of us to celebrate one of our crew's 30th birthday, we actually contemplated selling plasma or promising our first-born to the highest bidder. Luckily for us, we didn't have to.

Every Tuesday, Opera offers a $25, three-course meal that gives guests carte blanche with the menu. Unlike most deals of its kind, at most restaurants of its nature, Opera doesn't prepare a pre-chosen menu for the special. Guests can pick from anything off of the menu, price be damned. You select an appetizer, main entrée and a dessert, and the whole shebang is $25, no matter the prices listed on the menu. Want to try the $30 duck as your entrée? Go ahead! Doesn't matter. Still $25.

Is there another deal of this caliber in the city? We're not sure of it.

Chicagoist and Co. had a fun time with the deal, opting to share our selections with the whole table. We were particularly fond of Opera's Spicy Peanut Noodles, which basically tasted as though our jars of Jif had a passionate one-night stand with some rice noodles and pepper flakes, then ended up in our bowl, basking in the orgasmic afterglow of such a coupling. Really. They were that good. Also a treat were the Seasame Diver Scallops served over small beds of fried rice with a lemon-ginger vinaigrette, the Firecracker chicken, which features roasted chiles and scallion, and lastly the Kung Pao Beef, served in a strong, but not obnoxiously so, chili-garlic black bean sauce.

We'll be honest and say that for $25, with that much food, we probably wouldn't have turned our noses up at anything they brought out to our table. And we didn't expect much out of what we were served and the way in which it all was served to us - the place was a madhouse and we've come to expect that even in the most well-intended of places that when you're practically giving the food away and drawing that kind of crowd, you may suffer a tad on quality. Not so the night we were there. The service was attentive, prompt and friendly. We weren't blow away by Opera's Beef Broccoli presentation, but we figured that one out of four entrées ain't all bad.

One word of advice: watch your drink orders. Libations ain't cheap here and take your meal deal south pretty quickly.

The crowd is delightfully mixed — for as brash and colorful as the dining room is, it thankfully wasn't teeming with the sort of people you'd expect to find in a restaurant that looks as though it could double for a nightclub. You could bring your kids, or a date, or, as was the case for Chicagoist, a pack of your friends. The dress code is "casual fine dining," whatever the hell that really means, so we're just going to translate that into meaning that office attire is perfectly acceptable but so are pricey jeans and stiletto heels. We saw both and no one was turned away.

The best part of the evening - and you have to appreciate the genius of Jerry Kleiner and his crew, the owners of Opera - was when we were given our checks and each (EACH!) of us received a $50 gift certificate to Marché, the French sister spot of Opera. There is a minimum of $75 to spend but still - it was as though one cheap night begat another.

For reservations, call Opera at (312) 461-0161. Opera is located at 1301 S. Wabash, on the corner of 13th and Wabash.