Four New Restaurants You Shouldn't Miss This Week, Including A Steakhouse
By Anthony Todd in Food on Sep 7, 2016 1:56PM
The interior of GT Prime. Photo via Facebook.
It's a fairly busy week for new dining destinations. Let's get right to the news.
The big news racing through the dining scene is the opening of GT Prime, the long-awaited steakhouse from Chef Giuseppe Tentori and Boka Group. According to co-owner Kevin Boehm (who excitedly posted on Facebook), the opening was last night. The menu is, as you might expect, fairly steak-heavy, though there's a good assortment of other dishes to whet your appetite (a stuffed quail pot pie instantly rose to the top of my wish list). The most intriguing feature of the new steakhouse? Bucking the trend of mega-cuts, GT Prime will be serving their fancy cuts in smaller, more approachable 4 ounce portions. That way, guests can either try more—or avoid going home in a meat coma.
On a slightly smaller scale, Hyde Park residents can look forward to an awesome new outpost of Cemitas Puebla, which makes three locations for the popular sandwich shop. The Hyde Park Herald reports that the restaurant opened yesterday in the former Packed space, but the opening hasn't gotten much hype yet. So, if you happen to be down in Hyde Park, head on in now before the students figure it out.
We reported a few weeks ago about the opening of The Loyalist, a new super farm-to-table West Loop restaurant from a husband-and-wife chef team. The Loyalist was only half of the two-part concept, and the other half, Smyth, is now open for business. Unlike the less formal Loyalist, Smyth is a tasting menu spot, serving up an 8-course menu for $135, with dishes like slow cooked shoulder of lamb with kelp marmite, dungeness crab and foie gras with scrambled kani miso, and a salad with roasted squid stock.
So this isn't quite a new restaurant, but it's a new iteration of a favorite, so we'll include it. Acadia has always had a bit of a dual identity: The Michelin-starred fine dining tasting experience that gets all the press, and the front bar (serving the best lobster roll around) that tends to actually bring in the locals. So when we found out that the bar was re-doing and expanding its menu, our mouths started to water. The restaurant announced this morning that new dishes, including brussels sprouts with duck confit, pernod butter, and lemon, a "“Kentucky Fried” Jidori chicken with kimchi collard greens and honey and a Banh Mi with “Pho” hoisin glazed pork belly, cucumber, kewpie, cilantro, and jalapeño were coming to the menu. We'll definitely be checking this out soon.