DMK

We went to dinner at DMK Burger in Lombard (they also have a location in Chicago).  The Chicago location has been featured on Diners, Drive Ins and Dives.

Deviled Eggs

The burgers here are really thin patties, kind of the opposite of Kuma's Corner in that regard. But the flavors were pretty incredible.  They had good burger flavor combinations where you could taste all of the components.

Bison Burger

Bison Burger - with goat cheese, pickled onions and blueberry BBQ sauce. Really nice combination, especially with the onions and blueberry BBQ.  The only thing was that since the burger was so thin it was hard to tell that it was indeed a bison burger.

Holy Guac-Aoli Burger - with chorizo, guacamole  chipotle aioli. Nice amount of spice, not too overwhelming

Holy Guac-aoli burger

Cheddar scallion fries

Fries - with cheddar cheese and scallions. It was real cheddar cheese not just fake cheese wiz so it tasted really good

Chocolate shake - really good.  We were debating on whether to order this but it tasted great.

Free deviled eggs - They brought these out before the burgers - they had a little bit of a kick to them, almost like there was chili powder sprinkled on them instead of paprika.

Chocolate shake

We went before six on a Friday night and got seated right away but by the time we left there was definitely a line waiting for a table.

Final thoughts on DMK Burger:

Food - Good burger combinations - we really enjoyed the flavors more then Kuma's Corner. But Natalie thought the burger patty sizes were a bit small.

Service - good service; looks they may bring all newcomers to the restaurant a free deviled eggs order
Atmosphere - bar up front, all of the wait staff was dressed up for Halloween (we were there the weekend before Halloween).

Tallgrass

Amuse Bouche - Crab cake

We went to dinner at Tallgrass in Lockport.  It has been featured on Check Please and is generally known as one of the few fine dining establishments in the southwest suburbs.  It is located in downtown Lockport, which is far away from us, so it would be way far away for those who live in Chicago.

Potato that accompanied steak dish

The menu is set up in that you have a fixed price course meal (you cannot order any items a la carte).  You can choose to have 3, 4, 5 or 7 courses.  We chose the 4 course meal.  Basically of all of the items listed on the menu you can choose what you want as part of your courses and in what order.  You also designate one of the items as your main course, and this course is a slightly larger size and the other courses are more appetizer size.

Before the official first course we had an amuse bouche of a small crab cake. It was buttery and sweet as crab was in season.

First Course:

Soup Trio

Soup Trio: Squash/ Leek, Red Pepper/ Eggplant, Parsnip / Apple - all three soups were combined in one bowl.  They are 3 different colors so it looks like strips in the bowl. You could taste the distinct flavor of each soup. The red pepper soup had a warmer flavor. The parsnip/apple had a sharp note to it.  The squash/leek soup was sweet.

Asparagus, Feta, Endirve Sweet Red Pepper Panna Cotta

Asparagus, Feta, Endive, Sweet Red Pepper Panna Cotta, Hazelnuts, Chive Oil - This dish was amazing.  We have never had savory panna cotta but it was delicious.  Everything tasted great together.



 

Second Course:

Three Cheese Ravioli, French Onion Soup, Buttered Crumbs and prosciutto.  We expected a bit more french onion soup, but it was perfect size for a coursed meal.  The onions were sweet and although the ravioli were in the soup it didn't make the pasta soggy. 

Three Cheese Ravioli

 

Wild Diver Scallops, Chorizo Pilaf, Crisp Garlic, Piperade Shot,Lemon Butter - The scallops and rice pilaf were a nice combination.  The rice was a bit spicy due to the chorizo, but it certainly made us like rice pilaf better than normal.

 Third Course (main course):

N.Y. Strip, Fresh Herbs, Capers, Roasted Garlic, Paprika Aioli - we were surprised to see it served already sliced, but this made the presentation much more beautiful.  The flavors were awesome - nice and juicy steak.

Scallops

NY Strip

Assortment plate

Assortment Plate:  Lobster Lasagna, Prawn/Chorizo Tostada, Crab Beignet, Smoked Salmon Gnocchi, Parmesan Deviled Egg. This was also presented quite beautifully, with small portion of all the items. The beignet was warm and gooey but in a good way.  All of the seafood was delicious and delectable.  The deviled egg being served in the eggshell must be in presentation right now as we had the same presentation with an egg desert we had a few weeks ago at Takashi.

 

Fourth Course- We chose dessert as our last course but you could pick all savory options for all of your courses as well, if that is what you would prefer.

Chocolate Quintet: Tower, Truffle, Peanut Butter and Chocolate Crepe, Souffle, Pot de Creme.  No question about what dessert Nick would choose considering the options. The quintet covers all the bases with wonderful chocolate dessert options that all tasted great.

Pumpkin Souffle



Pumpkin and Maple Praline Souffle - there was a small chocolate souffle on the chocolate quintet plate, but this was a larger souffle of wonderful fall flavors. The creaminess of it melted in your mouth.

Chocolate Quintet

Natalie was pretty full at the end of the meal and Nick was pretty much full.  So 4 courses was definitely plenty for us.  You would probably have to be pretty hungry to do the 5 or 7 courses. 

Final thoughts on Tallgrass:

Food - really good food, I think we prefer it slightly to Courtrights which we recently dined at (one of the other fine dining estalishments in the southwest suburbs)

Service - the waitress explained each of our dishes as they came out, they brought out different utensils for each course

Atmosphere - a relatively small space, entrance is downstairs. One thing to keep in mind is that there is a set price depending on how many courses you choose to have. However, some of the food selections have a slight upcharge, so you may have a higher bill than expected.  The upcharges are specified clearly in the menu so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

Outside the restaurant (your enter down the stairs)

Amber

Papardelle

We went to dinner at Amber in Westmont.  It was just something we had heard about in the area.

What we ate:
Tomato Bisque Soup - creamy good soup for a colder day. It wasn't too thick and it was the perfect amount of acidity.

Tomato Bisque

Pork chop with squash puree and grilled grapes - massive 14 oz pork chop, the grapes were rather interesting - don't think we've ever had grilled grapes prepared like that before. What was great about this chop was even though it was very thick the flavor penetrated to the middle.

Papardelle with smoked short ribs, shredded Brussel sprouts, truffle and parmesan.  This dish had some interesting flavors.  The Brussel sprouts were truly shredded, but almost too thin of slices because we didn't get too much flavor from them

Pork Chop

Dessert - brownie with peanuts, caramel sauce, vanilla ice cream and bacon bits - so we succumbed to the whole bacon dessert fad thing and were conflicted about it.  Nick thought it brought a nice salty crunchy component to the dish but Natalie just thought it was a little weird.  Honestly without the bacon it really wasn't that unique of a dessert.

Final thoughts on Amber:
Food - every thing was tasty, we probably could have done without the dessert

Brownie a la mode

Service - The wait staff was great.  The only issue we had was that the entrees were kind of slow coming out; it must have been that massive pork chop they were trying to cook
Atmosphere - fancier than we thought it would be. There were a few larger groups and there looked to be a lot of regulars.  But for being a fancier place what was a little bizarre was having the owner's child (maybe she was around 10 or 11) as the hostess.  Some of the diners seemed to think she was cute, we just thought it was a little strange.

Silver Cloud

We ate dinner at Silver Cloud in Bucktown. We saw this place on Chicago's Best and have seen it in person when we have eaten at other places in the Bucktown / Wicker Park neighborhood (it is a block away from Hot Chocolate).

Basically we went here for the chicken pot pie that was featured on Chicago's Best. They seem to be known for comfort food so we also ordered mac n cheese and tater tots.

This seemed like more of a bar than a restaurant, but we went early on a Wednesday so there more diners were there than drinkers.

Chicken Pot Pie

Chicken pot pie - the crust was pretty amazing, very light and flaky, not heavy at all.  It was baked around a low bowl plate so we picked crust off of the side of the plate to get all the remnants. There wasn't a lot of chicken in the contents but everything was creamy. It came with either a soup or salad.  We ordered a salad, but there was nothing too specal about the salad except that the dressing was great handmade chipotle ranch.(salad not pictured)

Custom Mac n Cheese

Custom mac n cheese - this seemed like a good accompaniment to the pot pie.  We customized the regular mac n cheese by adding the unusual ingredients of pulled pork and caramelized onions.  It ended up tasting amazing - there was a lot of sweetness from the pork and the onions and the regular mac n cheese ended up making the whole concoction rather creamy and flavorful. We don't make a lot of mac n cheese at home, but by adding some different ingredients it really takes the food to a different level.

Tater Tots

Tater tots - nothing special, just sounded like more fun comfort food. They were baked instead of fried so we felt a little better about indulging in them.

Final thoughts on Silver Cloud:

Food - great food for a bar type of establishment, we saw what looked to be locals as the other customers

Service - laid back but prompt when the food was ready

Atmosphere - since we got there before 6 pm on a weeknight there weren't too many people there.  But it looks like it gets happening a bit later. On Thursdays they have trivia night but it doesn't start until 9 pm so that would preclude us from being able to get up for work the next morning. This neighborhood must have a lot of people from Michigan because the employees and customers were looking for the Detroit Tigers game on the TV.  Also the screen saver on the computer was the Detroit Lions mascot and there is a MSU bar right across the street.

Kuma's Corner

We ate dinner at Kuma's Corner after hearing about it for a while. We saw it on Diner's, Drive ins and Dives, and it has also been featured on Check Please.

They mainly serve burgers (but there are other items on the menu).  The burgers are 10 oz - so quite large, and they are served on pretzel buns.  These burgers were almost too large - in the sense that Natalie couldn't even fit a full cross section bite into her mouth.

We ordered 2 different hamburgers and tried each of them. All of the burgers are named after heavy metal bands to go along with the theme of the whole restaurant - it is very dark inside and they play metal music.

The burgers we ordered:

Absu - Tomatillo Salsa, Pepperjack, Red Onion Avocado Relish, Queso Fresco, Trio of Breaded Deep Fried Chiles.  This was a little spicier than Natalie would have wanted.  The toppings seemed to not be placed very evenly because sometimes you couldn't really taste some of the items - especially the case for Nick, he didn't even get to taste the cheese.

Mega Deth with chips

Mega Deth - Chorizo and Red Potato Hash, Pico de Gallo, Cayenne Avocado Cream, Tortilla Strips.  The combination sounded great - but it was a little mild after eating the Absu.  We would have preferred cheese on it

The menu did have a lot of very unique burger combinations.  Maybe we chose poorly but we really didn't think they were super special. If we compare this experience to our experiences eating at Hot Dougs or Frank N Dawgs (gourmet and specialty hot dogs and sausages), we didn't enjoy the food as much. 

Absu burger with fries

Kuma's has a lot of rules

- i.e. no reservations. no substitutions of ingredients, so you have to follow how they do things.  This is fine with us but might be a problem for others

We had heard that because they don't take reservations and they have a smaller dining area that some people can wait up to 2 hours on busier nights.  Therefore we went on a Wednesday night and succeeded in having a much shorter wait - about 15 minutes.

Maybe there was just way too much hype about this place but there is no way we would want to wait 2 hours to eat here.

Another thing to mention is that the kitchen is very small so it takes a few minutes longer than normal to get the food out to each table.

Final Thoughts on Kuma's Corner:
Food - good but not great.  It could have just been our expectations or because we have some awesome burgers within a 10 minute drive of us at Palmer Palace and Back Alley burger (with little to no wait and not as many rules)
Service - pretty standard, we already knew what we wanted to order because we had looked at the menu while we were waiting to be seated, so that sped things up a bit
Atmosphere - very unique, you could tell pretty easily who were the regulars versus the newbies (all of the newbies, including us, had cameras out taking pictures of everything). It was loud inside so not a place to take grandma.

Takashi

We went to dinner at Takashi in Bucktown.  We had heard about it on Check Please and also we know that the chef (Takashi himself) competed on Top Chef Masters (so he is somewhat of a celebrity chef).

Pork Belly Appetizer

Appetizers
Pork Belly - soy ginger caramel pork belly with pickled daikon salad and steamed buns.  We were told to eat it like an open face sandwich.  This dish was not only fun but tasted great. The soy ginger caramel flavor was unique and it was fun to make the little sandwiches. A must have - this was probably the best dish of the night.

Scallops - sauteed Maine scallops and gnocchi, with trumpet mushrooms and celery root - parmesan foam.  The whole dish was super creamy and the scallops and gnocchi worked really well together. The celery root foam was very aromatic and was a delicate way to flavor the scallops.

Main Plates

Seared Veal Loin - with onion gratin, couscous, and bacon wrapped asparagus. This was a wonderful paring. The bacon was crispy and a flavored the asparagus with a hint of salt.

Roasted duck breast with baby turnips and green beans.  Nick didn't like eating the fat on the duck; he felt it was a little under done (but that's probably the way duck is supposed to be served).

Scallops Appetizer

Desserts

Sesame Panna Cotta with Genoise cake, pickled cherries, cherry cocoa nib ice cream. A wonderful presentation - it was both sweet and tangy

Egg - milk chocolate creme brulee inside a brown egg, with caramel custard foam, and served with a macaroon (very soft not like hard ones we are used to eating), just a beautiful thing to look at.  We marveled at how they cooked this inside the egg. It didn't disapont in the flavor department. It was smooth and creamy with a warm sweet chocloate finish.

Roasted Duck Breast

Final thoughts on Takashi:

Food - very good and interesting flavor combinations. We knew it was going to be a fusion of French and Japanese, but it definitely leaned more French than we had anticipated.  Everything tasted great but with a restaurant called Takashi we expected more Japanese flavors. We preferred the appetizers and desserts over the entrees so maybe that is the way to go in the future. We saw others sharring appetizers like tapas.

Service - excellent, attentive to all of our needs

Atmosphere- upscale, small dining area on the first floor. most of the customers were more yuppie types (well it is pricey).  As a side note, as we walked in the restaurants we actually bumped into chef and owner Takashi.

Seared Veal Loin

Panna Cotta

The Egg Dessert