Les Nomades
“I love everything about this place,” said Phil Vettel in the Chicago Tribune. More than 30 years after opening, Les Nomades remains my top recommendation for a quiet dinner in Chicago, because the food earns four stars and “there’s nothing this restaurant does that isn’t stylish.” Owner Mary Beth Liccioni always offers a warm welcome to guests, who enter a dining room beautifully adorned with art and flowers, then settle in for a flawless $130 four-course or $145 five-course dinner. Saigon-born chef Roland Liccioni, who was a Chicago treasure long before his first night at Les Nomades, has not lost his touch with the classics—a quartet of pâtés, roasted duck breast with duck leg confit. But he’s also embracing hints of spices with some dishes, including a wonderful artichoke terrine with a black-garlic purée. You can order wine by the glass or half-bottle if you’re trying to economize, but you cannot skip dessert. The pastry chefs produce soufflés that are “majestically tall and cloudlike”—the best I have ever had. 222 E. Ontario St., (312) 649-9010 in New York where women are in charge of everything you eat,” and her cooking steers its own course. But life is complicated. Del Posto was until last year a jewel in the culinary empire of Mario Batali, and even though a recent buyout has chased away Batali and the sexual harassment charges shadowing him, the stately Chelsea restaurant still begs for a tonal makeover. Though Del Posto is “not exclusively for rich people,” it is “explicitly for occasions,” and it won’t be a comfortable place to eat until it frees its servers from such pointless tasks as twice replacing each guest’s napkin. Rodriguez’s cooking, by contrast, is the opposite of showy. She creates Italian dishes according to tradition while “putting them together so elegantly that they seem