Review: Graham Elliot

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Jul 28, 2008 3:30PM

The \"London Calling\" ($14), a take on a Pimm\'s Cup, is made using Pimm\'s, Plymouh Gin, ginger syrup, apple nectar and cucumber soda and garnished with a cucumber slice. Refreshing, but virtually no hint of ginger in the mix.

One of the dishes we sampled at the Graham Elliot soft opening that still worked well on our latest visit is this beet salad dish. The beets are served with young arugula, whipped horseradish, toasted hazlenuts and peppercorn vinaigrette.

One of the best dishes on the menu is also one of the most simple. This is a potato gnocchi with shaved pecorino, a fried hen\'s egg and white truffle oil.

This is Graham Elliot\'s much-discussed aged cheddar risotto. Although the most talked-about ingredient of the dish is the Cheeze-Its, Bowles has finally managed to find a balance between savory, sweet and saltiness using granny smith apples, prosciutto and pearl onions glazed in Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

Another dish that won us over upon second tasting was the ahi tuna carpaccio. Some elements of this dish have changed, which made it a better focused menu item. Gone are the listed cucumber noodles and radish scallion salad. In its place is a tangy chickpea salad topped with a pimento foam.

Bowles\'s take on buffalo chicken is a de-boned thigh served atop a bed of celery root slaw with maytag bleu cheese, a brush stroke of homemade buffalo sauce across the plate and Budweiser foam. Tasty dish, but the presentation of the foam makes the dish look a bit sloppy. And we didn\'t really care.

Summer soups are represented here with a beautiful artichoke bisque.

Another simple dish that blew the table away was a pan-roasted skate served with a polenta cake crusted with a caper-raisin chutney.

This is a molten carrot cake with a center of cream cheese and a raisin marmalade served with a sorbet.

This wonderful dish is cracked corn sorbet with a blackberry reduction.

We attended the soft opening for Graham Elliot, the new River North "bistronomic restaurant" from former Avenues chef Graham Elliot Bowles at 217 W. Huron, last month and were sufficiently impressed by what we sampled to put it on our list of restaurants to return, keeping in mind that soft openings are generally where a new restaurant does its best to maintain initial appearances

Since that soft opening, however, Bowles has taken his lumps in print from food critics from everything from Bowles's attempt to "informalize" fine dining to a lack of balance in the dishes. We've heard from conversations with other food writers that, in particular, Mike Sula's highly critical review of Graham Elliot in the Reader left Bowles stunned. It also seems as though Bowles took the criticism to heart and has slowly adjusted things to the point where the irony of progressive cuisine being served by a staff outfitted in Chuck Taylors no longer overshadows the food. Those initial reviews also seemed to have served notice to Bowles that, while he may have earned some benefit of the doubt in realizing the vision for his restaurant, that doesn't mean he should hang himself with the rope he's been given.

Gone are personal touches like the menus with Bowles's illegible handwritten notes and the bar snacks menu (removed because many customers were not aware it existed). The volume of the background music, while still loud, has also been turned down a notch or two to better emphasize the warmth of the room. You'll still hear everything from Coltrane to Huey Lewis and the News come out of the speakers, but its previous ear-shattering volume is no longer a distraction. With rotating seasonal display cases (currently featuring lemons), exposed brick and seating reminiscent of mk and low-hanging light fixtures, Graham Elliot has the potential to be one of the most romantic and fun rooms in the city. Looking at the room from the street, it's completely unrecognizable from its previous guise as Harvest on Huron.

The menu has become more balanced from a flavor perspective, as well. Bowles has tweaked the balance between hot and blue cheese on Buffalo chicken appetizer, although it's still served topped with copious amounts of Budweiser foam that made us look twice at it before we chowed down. The much-discussed Cheeze-It risotto has also struck that delicate balance between the sweetness of apples, saltiness of cured bacon and the bite of those cheddar snacks.

That doesn't mean that everything at Graham Elliot is hunky dory now. We still get a slight chill reading the prices of the menu. It isn't that we expected some sticker shock; we expected going in to drop close to $100 on dinner. But the disparity in price between appetizer and entrée (with no discernible difference in portion) still leaves us bug-eyed as we type. Problems still exist between the conception and execution of Graham Elliot's signature cocktails. The Pimm's Cup variant "London Calling," which Sula said in his review was all gin and ginger up front and nothing at the bottom, now has too much cucumber soda at the bottom and no ginger.The "Cactus Flower," a margarita variant using pear syrup, also fell a bit short in execution. At $14 a pop, these are some pricey miscues.

Graham Elliot (217 W. Huron, 312-624-9975) is open 5:30 p.m. - 10:30 p.m. Sunday through Thursday, 5-11 p.m. Friday and Saturday.