The Pump Room

Our next Restaurant Week meal was at The Pump Room in the Gold Coast neighborhood of Chicago. This restaurant was originally established in 1938 and has served lots of celebrities over the years.  Natalie has heard about it for a while and wanted to try it.

Appetizer
- salmon, crispy sushi rice and chipotle aioli
- roasted carrot and avocado salad, crunch seeds, sour cream and citrus vinaigrette
Both of the options were tasty but we just wish there was more of them.  The salmon (as you can see from the picture) was just two sushi size pieces. Both dishes were inventive and different than the typical sushi or salad.

almon with crispy rice

Roasted Carrot and Avocado Salad

Main

Salmon with Broccoli Rabe

- slowly cooked salmon with broccoli rabe, ginger-chili vinaigrette
- lamb chops, mushroom bolonese, broccoli rabe and chili oil
The main dishes were good; but we enjoyed the appetizers a lot better. Again the salmon was super small, especially since we wanted to split it so we both could try it.


Dessert
- sundae, salted caramel ice cream, candied peanuts and popcorn, whipped cream, chocolate sauce
Nice dessert with a lot things going on with it.  The combo of the ice cream flavor itself with the peanuts and popcorn was unique and now we have new items to add to ice cream sundae bars.

Lamb Chops

Ice Cream Sundae

Final thoughts on The Pump Room:
Food - the food was great and we had lots of unique dishes but the salmon dishes (both appetizer and main) were extremely small considering a restaurant week cost of $44 for the fixed course meal. When we ordered the server kept asking if we wanted to order more food - we understood why when we saw the size of the dishes. We left feeling really hungry. It was just a really low value for the food itself.

Service - we felt like we could have had things explained a little better.  Instead of the server prodding to see if we wanted to order more, she could have explained that the courses were small.

Atmosphere - the space itself is very interesting, lots of orb lights floating above.  The Pump Room is attached to to a hotel.  The hotel changed management a few years ago and the Pump Room changed a bit at that time. Overall it is a bit pretentious feeling though. Maybe for us it that whole feeling started with where this is located.  The neighborhood is mostly residential and therefore all of the street parking is by local permit only.  So really it is only valet parking only in the few blocks surrounding the restaurant.  If it had been summer we would have found another parking place a few blocks away that didn't have to be valet.  So this combined with the low food value ratio just caused us to be disappointed. We wanted to enjoy this experience but were left feeling bad about "wasting" a Restaurant Week dining experience here.