by Julian Cross | Food & Dining Correspondent, IRREVERENT
WINNETKA, IL — The hostess at Guts asked if I had any dietary restrictions. I told her I was morally opposed to wasting my time. She smiled as if I'd said something charming and led me through an Edison-bulb gauntlet to a table where the napkin had been folded, with evident pride, into a small intestine.
I ordered a black coffee. The server asked if I'd like it "course-integrated." I looked at him until he went away and came back with coffee in a cup. It was the only thing that arrived without a backstory.
Guts opened six weeks ago in a converted Victorian on Green Bay Road, the kind of address where real estate agents use words like "storied" to mean "expensive." The concept, according to the press release I didn't request, is "an unflinching elevation of the whole animal." The chef, a 31-year-old named Derek who spent eighteen months staging in Lyon, wants to make offal "approachable." I spent twenty years in professional kitchens. I can tell you what makes offal approachable: not charging $42 for it.
The first course arrived on a slate tile the size of a license plate. "Le Jardin d'Abats," the server announced, "a curated garden of the animal's lesser-celebrated architecture."
It was a cold terrine of tripe, rolled into rosettes, arranged around a pool of bone marrow mousse dyed green with parsley oil to resemble moss. There were also what the menu called "pickled auricles" — which, translated from the original nonsense, meant pig ears sliced thin enough to see through. It looked like something you'd find in a biology lab's wet specimen drawer. It tasted like the jar.
I flagged down the coffee cup and sat with it for a moment. The room was full of people who had driven from the city in luxury SUVs to eat parts of an animal that butchers used to give away for free in buckets. A woman at the next table was photographing her plate with a ring light clipped to her phone. I quietly wished her battery would die in a house fire.
The second course was "Foie de Volaille en Deux Températures." Translation: chicken liver. One half was seared and served rare; the other was whipped into a parfait and piped into a cylinder that reminded me, structurally, of bathroom caulk. The menu noted that the bird was "pasture-raised in Jo Daviess County and humanely dispatched to fulfill Chef Derek's vision." I would argue that any chicken whose destiny is a $28 liver parfait has not, in fact, been humanely dispatched. It has been ironically dispatched.
The server asked how I was enjoying the meal. I said the plate was very clean. He took this as enthusiasm and described the "soil" beneath the parfait — a crumble of dried blood and rye — for ninety seconds. I nodded in the specific rhythm that makes people stop talking. Under my breath, I muttered, "It's cold water, Kevin."
Course three: "Ris de Veau, Émulsion de Lardon." Sweetbreads. Thymus gland, to be precise, though Guts prefers the term "veal secrétaire," which I assume is French for "gland that filters hormones and is now on your fork." The sweetbreads were well-cooked, I'll give Derek that. Properly cleaned, soaked, blanched, and pan-seared until the exterior had the kind of caramelization that used to mean someone in the kitchen knew what they were doing. Then he ruined it by draping it in a bacon foam.
Foam. Of course there was foam. Because nothing says "I respect the ingredient" like turning it into a texture you can wipe off a countertop with a squeegee. I moved it to the edge of the plate and it sat there like a witness considering a plea deal.
By the fourth course, the room had developed a rhythm. Small plates arrived with grave ceremony. Diners leaned in, photographed, whispered. It was the hushed reverence of a church where the communion wafer is made of heart valve.
"Cœur de Bœuf, Compote d'Oignon," the server intoned. Beef heart, braised in red wine until it achieved the texture and approximate color of a failed relationship. It was served with pearl onions that had been glazed until they wept. The heart was tender, I'll admit. It had also been tender when it was doing its actual job inside a living animal. Now it was doing a different kind of labor: justifying a $58 tasting menu in the northern suburbs.
The chef emerged from the kitchen to make rounds. He was wearing clogs and an apron that said "OFFAL RESPECT" in block letters. He asked what I thought of the "philosophy." I told him philosophy is what you study when you're avoiding trade school. He laughed, uncertainly, and moved on to the ring-light woman, who was now filming a video about the "mouthfeel" of pickled auricles.
Course five arrived under a glass dome filled with applewood smoke. When the server lifted it, the smoke curled upward like a soul departing. What remained was "La Langue de Mère" — Mother's Tongue — described on the menu as "an ode to the matriarchal lineage of nourishment." It was cow tongue. Sliced thin. With horseradish cream. The matriarchal lineage of nourishment had been brined for seventy-two hours and plated on a ceramic disc handmade by a collective in Michigan.
I ate it. It was fine. Tongue is fine. Every culture that ever had to feed itself has figured out tongue. The Koreans barbecue it. The Mexicans braise it into tacos. The French call it langue de bœuf and charge fourteen euros at brasseries where the chairs don't have lumbar support. Here, it was "an ode" and cost more than my first knife.
The final course was dessert. Or rather, it was called "Le Dernier Muscle" — the last muscle — which turned out to be a panna cotta made with rendered beef tallow and topped with candied kidney. I took a bite. It tasted like someone had described vanilla to a person who had never tasted vanilla, over the phone, in a different language, during a hurricane.
I paid the check. It was $187 before tip. For that money, I could have bought three entire animals and eaten every part myself in a parking lot, with my hands, in the rain, with greater dignity.
Walking out, I passed the open kitchen. Derek was arranging something on a plate with tweezers. A line cook next to him was trimming a lobe of something I didn't want to identify. They both looked very serious. They both looked very young. They both looked like they believed that calling a thing by a French name makes it French, and that bravery is what you charge for the parts other people discard.
It's not gutsy to serve tripe. It's gutsy to serve tripe honestly, without the fog machine and the tweezer architecture and the $42 price tag. What Guts serves isn't bravery. It's boutique anxiety dressed in a chef's coat, hoping you won't notice that the emperor's new clothes are made of actual intestine.
I got in my car and drove south until I found a diner on Roosevelt where the coffee was burnt and the waitress didn't ask about my vision. I ordered eggs and hash browns and sat there until the sun went down. No one folded my napkin into anything. No one told me the chicken's life story. The eggs tasted like eggs. The coffee tasted like penance.
It was the best meal I'd had all week.
Julian Cross is Food & Dining Correspondent at IRREVERENT. He lives in Chicago, drinks his coffee black, and is still banned from three kitchens in the West Loop.
Editor's Note: It took every ounce of intestinal fortitude I have to not work the phrase "offal dining" into this piece.
The "Guts" restaurant discussed here is fiction and any resemblance to any existing restaurant is coincidental and sad.