High-Profile Chicago Restaurants Reassessed

In addition to trying new restaurants in Chicago, I returned to two old favorites. Regrettably, their current performances did not live up to my fond memories, or to their Michelin stars.

moto

I loved the high-flying molecular cuisine of moto when it opened 10 years ago, and the fact that it has maintained its Michelin star gave me hope that it had aged gracefully. It has not. Some of our eight courses were successful, but most were uninventive, and a few were quite disagreeable (a chewy and visually unappealing goat dish comes vividly to mind). moto used to be in the vanguard, but its creative energy is clearly exhausted.

945 West Fulton Market. Tel. (312) 491-0058.

North Pond

This Prairie-style restaurant has an unparalleled setting on the bank of North Pond in Lincoln Park. The Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired interior exudes sense of place, and out the French doors, the Chicago skyline glimmers above the treetops. Few restaurants in Chicago are more romantic, but on this visit, the food was surprisingly inconsistent. Our appetizers — seared foie gras with apples, delicata squash and cider-doughnut purée, and charred tuna with falafel and eggplant caponata — were balanced and complex. But the flavors of Mrs. Harper’s sea bass failed to integrate, and the pheasant I ordered was tasty but sometimes tough. The misconceived dessert — a dry stout beer cake with tart cranberries, maple-poached pear and burned candied walnuts — failed on all counts. Our waiter, to his credit, swiftly replaced it with some excellent house-made ice creams and deleted the dessert from our bill. In the end, North Pond’s warm and accommodating service somewhat redeemed its culinary missteps.

2610 North Cannon Drive. Tel. (773) 477-5845.

A version of this article appeared in the March 2015 print edition of Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report under the headline “High-Profile Restaurants Reassessed.”