Review: Starland Could Shine A Little Brighter
By Melissa Wiley in Food on Sep 25, 2013 6:20PM
Nostalgia is trendy these days. For it to really work, though, you have to like your bit of something old even more now than you did in days gone by, because there’s nothing easier than convincing yourself your mom’s meatloaf tasted better than it actually did. So when a restaurant like Starland sets out to compete with the foods of yesteryear, it has to do it right. And in our opinion, Theo Gilbert’s rebranding of Ripasso as a Brady-era beach house fails to adequately make up for all that lost time. With the exception of the chicken dinner, the food may be good enough to pass for something past, but served in only small plate portions, there’s just not enough of it. Add to that a strange coldness permeating the carefully homespun atmosphere and we left hungry for something more.
We wandered into Starland last Sunday evening to try the chicken dinner and some of the a la carte items forming the bulk of the main menu alongside a selection of half sandwiches, sides, and desserts, all nostalgia-saturated fare in petite serving sizes. Once we ordered and paid for our food and drinks from the single server manning the counter, we seated ourselves facing the bar. Our eyes soon glanced past the many bottles of wine, bourbon, and tequila before fixing on a scree of classic board games beneath a stenciled sailboat. When we asked whether we could play one—we were leaning toward Yahtzee—the server nodded yes but quickly redirected his attention to his iPhone instead. Not being bold enough to venture behind the cash register and grab it for ourselves, we contented ourselves with some idle thumb twiddling. Which was fine, because our food was due to arrive soon anyway and who wants dice in their coleslaw? But when a restaurant configures itself like a comfy collective living room, complete with a pair of worn sable couches and a lamp looking just like the one your grandpa made in 4-H when he was 11, you expect the board games to sit closer within reach. You expect more comfort with your comfort food and are a little disappointed as a result.
After consuming our small plates pretty post haste, we still felt hungry as digestion set in because the server, when asked, recommended only one plate for a modest appetite and two for a large and greedy one. We thought ours was modest at the time, but the short ribs with cilantro, cucumber, and sesame ($6) and warm corn custard with basil pesto ($6) barely did the trick, though we enjoyed both enough for seconds were they by chance on offer. So we moseyed back up to the counter and ordered the roasted mushrooms with fried artichoke, arugula, manchego, and aioli ($6) and can’t say we wouldn’t return sometime for those few savory bites alone.
Typically the smaller the plate, the bigger the precision. Only Starland’s menu centers on supper staples like chicken and dumplings and cheesy noodle bake, fare you generally want in heartier helpings, that doesn’t as a rule worry about pleasing your fussier palates. Precision, in other words, doesn’t usually equate with comfort in our book, but then we can’t relax on anything less than a full stomach either. Gilbert’s smaller serving sizes did, however, fulfill on the promise of a higher flavor quotient, meaning there’s no reason to quibble with the price, that less food actually is more taste here, and perhaps we should start reining it in already.
Still, maybe it was because we were forced to sit staring up at games we began suspecting were missing some dice, but as we waited for our mushrooms we wondered whether a menu fetishizing good ol' comfort cuisine shouldn’t serve some larger plates as well. While Bootsy Collins got his funk on in the background, we asked ourselves why Starland doesn’t just provide a full sandwich for the hungrier crowd. Why so cautious when all appearances—the wooden water skis on the wall, the smattering of plaid thermoses on the bookshelves—all but roundly intoned it was time to cozy up and eat a little more than you should?
Starland’s best answer to that is Grammy’s Sunday fried chicken dinner ($15), including mashed potatoes and gravy, stewed greens, coleslaw, three pieces of chicken, a biscuit, and choice of either juice, beer, or a house cocktail. And would be a bargain were the chicken or even the coleslaw half as flavorful as the short ribs, roasted mushrooms, or corn custard, that and the buttermilk biscuit not quite so hard and cold. Grammy, we understand, may well be on her last leg, but if she wants return customers she needs to focus. And learn to use the pepper shaker.
Call us uncivilized, but we always make a mess of ribs, even when there are just two of them, and our table provided us with only one abrasive brown paper napkin. And if we’re going to be comfortable, we like to have more than one at our disposal. We’d also rather not bother Starland’s lone employee about it, that or leave our chair if we’re being completely honest. He was busy, it turns out, with another customer anyway at the time, so we did our best to lick the dried barbecue off our face with our limited tongue length, of which there are harder things in life, we realize. But the truth is, if Starland were to viably enter the dinner rotation, we’d like to know they had the napkin base covered going in. That we’d have access to two, maybe three, if we needed them. And we’d like to have the option to play some Yahtzee as long as they’re putting it out there, if not exactly on the table.
Starland is located at 1619 N. Damen.