I'm totally going to sound like an old lady when I say this but back in the day when I went to school at Northwestern and lived in Evanston, there were like 4-5 decent restaurants and there were definitely no high end/fancy places. Fast forward over 10 years later after I've graduated (gulp!), Evanston has totally exploded into a town that I barely recognize. The place is crawling with tons of restaurants/bars and shops. Since I was visiting Soph in the 'burbs, we decided to check out Found Kitchen in our old stomping ground. Apparently it's been written up in a lot of Chicago articles as being one of the best new restaurants in all of Chicago, so it sounded worth checking out.
When we get there, I was shocked at how upscale/trendy it was for a restaurant in a college town. It had this gastropub feel and it was packed to the gills on a Friday night. Given the price point, the clientele was not a lot of college kids (although there are your fair share of rich kids at NU) but mostly professors, locals and probably some B-school/grad students. Also, strangely there were TONS of cougars - I realize I'm not spring chicken but these women were clearly in their 40's and all wearing skin tight dresses and/or sequenced tank tops when it was like 20 degrees outside. It was really bizarre. They told us it would be about 30-40 minutes, so we tried to squeeze our way to the bar but it was equally crowded and retreated to this back room.
We were finally seated after about 45 minutes in the front of the restaurant. I didn't realize that the style of food here is also American small plates/tapas. WTF?! How is this style of food everywhere? I guess the only difference between small plates in NYC vs. Chicago is that in Chicago they are actually all closer to regular size entrees, so you are definitely getting full off of 2 plates/per person. The three of us split the apple and beet salad ($13), polenta ($14) and Soph and I split the flat iron steak entree ($26). The apple and beet salad was served with walnuts and goat cheese. It was your typical beet and goat cheese salad - it was good, but it's hard to get the combination of beets and goat cheese wrong. The polenta was with parsnips, shiitake mushrooms, parmesan cheese, and a poached egg on top. This egg was nicely poached and had a super runny yolk. Again, it was a good dish but it's hard to get polenta with tons of butter and cheese to taste bad although I will give them props for the well poached egg. On to the steak. I felt a bit bad because Soph had wanted it to be medium and I asked for medium rare and when it came out it was most definitely closer to the rare side - almost bordering on too rare. We both love meat, so neither of us really complained when we saw it but it was definitely visibly super pink. I usually love rare meat but as Soph mentioned, this was a bit too chewy. It was didn't have that melt in your mouth texture to it that a good steak needs to have. It also came with sunchokes which were undercooked and just weren't my favorite part of the dish. Meanwhile, for some reason we were still hungry so we got an order of fries ($5) and the roasted squash and brussels sprouts ($9). They called the fries "frites" on the menu but let's be honest, they were just fries with a side of aioli mayo and sweet chili ketchup. This definitely helped to fill us up. By the time the squash dish came out, I wasn't really that hungry anymore. It wasn't a particularly memorable dish but at least the brussels sprouts here were cooked and more easily edible than the ones at Sable. Even though we were full, we of course had to order dessert. We opted for the chocolate pot de creme ($7) - I really seem to be replicating my meal from Sable with such a similar line up of food. Similar to how I felt about everything else I ate, the dessert was good but it's a dish that's really hard to really f*ck up - I mean it's essentially chocolate pudding but I did appreciate the sprinkling of sea salt on top to give it that nice contrast of sweet and salty.
All in all, the meal was fine but I didn't find any of the dishes challenging to the palate or too memorable. I do think it's a nice addition to a college/suburban town but I don't think I would necessarily make a special trek to come back out here again. And for those of you who do end up there, yes, the jellyfish in the aquarium is fake. Total bill: $47/pp with tax and tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
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