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<\/a>We recently\u00a0had a superb meal at\u00a0Elizabeth, a restaurant in Chicago owned and operated by chef Iliana Regan.\u00a0 \u00a0 As is often the case, our Chicago friends have written much\u00a0more insightful\u00a0pieces\u00a0about the restaurant then you’ll get out of me.\u00a0 Check out here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a> for an interview with Iliana.<\/p>\n Some of Elizabeth’s influences are clear.\u00a0 There are more than just\u00a0shades of Alinea in the precision and\u00a0focus of the kitchen during service (not surprisingly, Iliana worked the front of the house at Alinea).\u00a0 And Iliana’s New Forager cuisine is plainly the new world cousin of\u00a0Redzepi’s New Nordic.\u00a0 But Elizabeth also feels like a deeply personal restaurant, one that just wouldn’t be the same without Iliana in the kitchen.<\/p>\n Perhaps one day I’ll be lucky enough to have had so many great meals that I will finally become sick of stuffing myself with twenty odd courses over four hours.\u00a0 Perhaps.\u00a0 Until that day comes, bring it on.\u00a0 Elizabeth’s tasting menu was everything I want in a meal like this: it was too long (but I didn’t want it to end), it was\u00a0surprising at times (but comforting at others), and each course was memorable (but\u00a0may of the details are are jumbled and hazy in recollection).\u00a0 If I had to pick a favorite course, it would be the sunchoke soup with cattail pollen bread served with bacon butter, honey, and strawberry preserves (4th down on the left).\u00a0 But the shrimp noodle (3rd down on left), the scallop, porcini and strawberry Cheerios in chestnut milk (3rd column, 3rd down), and the curry rice crispy with bear jerky (2nd column, 2nd down) are also in contention.\u00a0 Wait, did I mention the spruce soda (2nd column, 4th down)?\u00a0 The vinegar ice cream (left bottom)?\u00a0 The perfect bite of ribeye with broccoli mousse (left, 4th down)?\u00a0 How about the cabbage marmalade (right, 3rd down), which was so good it could revolutionize<\/em> the bratwurst.<\/p>\n Leslie’s favorite\u00a0of the night\u00a0was the fish(head) course.\u00a0 Each table got a different piece of the fish and Leslie was so excited that we got the head.\u00a0 “I’m sure they give the head to the table they like the most” she said.<\/p>\n One of the reasons we chose Elizabeth was our\u00a0burgeoning interest in foraged food, an interest which was sparked by a talk given by Sam Thayer<\/a> at the\u00a0Kickapoo Country Fair<\/a> a few years ago.\u00a0 Truth be told, we found our meal to be more of a progressive cuisine experience than a foraging or farm-to-table one.\u00a0 This, I think, was largely due to the fact that it was the winter menu, and foraged food is thin on the ground (literally)\u00a0in the Upper Midwest\u00a0in\u00a0March.\u00a0\u00a0Certainly the meal had a earthy, root vegetable-y vibe not really found in strictly\u00a0modernist restaurants, but we are excited to go back in the summer when the forest floor\u00a0will have a bit more to offer.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Winter 2014 Elizabeth Menu<\/strong><\/p>\n —<\/p>\n Farm and Forest<\/em><\/p>\n Terrarium of What Deer Eat<\/p>\n Farm Carrots to Pop<\/p>\n Chicken Liver and Vegetable Tartare with Rose Vinegar<\/p>\n Vacuum Tea of the Forest Floor<\/p>\n \u00a0—<\/p>\n Rock Courses<\/em><\/p>\n Oyster and Borscht<\/p>\n Wild Rice Crispy with Bear<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n Caviar<\/em><\/p>\n Tree Nest with Snail Roe<\/p>\n Aerated Potato with Osetra<\/p>\n \u00a0—<\/p>\n Off Menu<\/em><\/p>\n Shrimp Tempura<\/p>\n \u00a0—<\/p>\n Elizabeth Staples<\/em><\/p>\n Shrimp Noodles<\/p>\n Mushroom Tea<\/p>\n Fried Woodland Mushroom<\/p>\n \u00a0—<\/p>\n Centerpiece<\/em><\/p>\n Vegetable Leather (Carrot and Beet)<\/p>\n \u00a0—<\/p>\n Bread and Soup<\/em><\/p>\n Sunchoke, Cattail, and Elderflower Vinegar<\/p>\n \u00a0—<\/p>\n Silly<\/em><\/p>\n Cheerios<\/p>\n \u00a0—<\/p>\n Mains<\/em><\/p>\n Fish Head with Fiddlehead Ferns<\/p>\n Kombucha<\/p>\n Beef Heart with Cabbage<\/p>\n Ribeye with End-of-Summer Vegetables<\/p>\n Spruce Soda<\/p>\n \u00a0—<\/p>\n Sweets<\/em><\/p>\n Rose Sorbet with Quail Egg Yolks<\/p>\n Gingersnap and Donuts with Minus 8<\/p>\n \u00a0Pate de Fruit and Chocolates<\/p>\n Apple Thumbprint Cookie<\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some of Elizabeth’s influences are clear. There are more than just shades of Alinea in the precision and focus of the kitchen during service. And Iliana’s New Forager cuisine is plainly the new world cousin of Redzepi’s ‘New Nordic’. But Elizabeth also feels like a deeply personal restaurant, one that just wouldn’t be the same without Iliana in the kitchen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5408,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557,8],"tags":[374,381,675,36],"class_list":["post-5407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-drifted-appetite","category-restaurants","tag-chicago","tag-foraging","tag-modernist-cuisine","tag-restaurant","has-featured-image"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5407"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5772,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5407\/revisions\/5772"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"kitchen\"](\"http:\/\/driftlessappetite.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/kitchen.jpg\")
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