Summer House Santa Monica
 Chicago, Illinois        Date of Visit  11/17/16       http://summerhousesm.com/?loc=chicago

We arrived at our smartly appointed and located B&B in anticipation of dinner at the world heralded Alinea…but that’s tomorrow night and our race against the predicted arrival time on the GPS has been fueled by pretzels and peanut M&M’s. Time to eat. Over a bottle of wine we decided to push Chicago deep dish pizza to lunch tomorrow and take advantage of one of the four options within 100 feet, oysters, tacos, pizza or California cuisine. As we sat on the third floor patio enjoying the second to last warm day of the year, I felt pretty sure the smells that were driving me animalistic were coming from the Summer House Santa Monica and I picked. Whoops.
 

Probably The Best We Had In Fake Summer
 

Then the food started to arrive.

We started with toasted cauliflower, guacamole and fire baked beets. The guac was probably the best of the bunch…nothing extraordinary like the regally adorned avocado at Xoco, but tasty with well-done chips and fair salsa. We love some roasted cauliflower but I found the jalapeño pesto, parmesan, candied lemon, and bread crumbs too complicated, completely overpowering the veg. It could have been packing peanuts. I’ll take a little lemon and dusting of grated parm over this any day.
 

From best to worst, the entrées started with the spice rubbed bigeye tuna taco platter served with slow-cooked black beans, cumin-scented rice, guacamole, charred tomato salsa, tomatillo salsa and fresh corn tortillas. You couldn’t really taste the tuna if you piled it into the tortilla but at least it tasted of something. We also tried a quinoa & forbidden black rice bowl with green curry sauce and local vegetables. The mushy veg didn’t do anything to help the quinoa and rice. I did very much enjoy the lightly sweet, warmly spiced, and super green curry. I’ll take the curry and the roasted cauliflower without the other stuff.
 

Not Terrible...That Was Still Coming
 

After a meandering presentation on California cuisine we were told the special of the day is a copy of a dish from New York in which there are no Chinese ingredients but somehow, “presto”, turns out to taste like Chinese food. The braised shortrib ended up being more like chewy leather than Chinese, but the al dente Isrealei cous cous wasn’t bad. So average, saved only by sauce and pasta pearls, what ends up at the bottom?
Orecchiette & king crab was a disaster all around. Supposedly united with candied lemon, lardo, chives, parmesan, and fresno chilies, the dry and reheated pasta shells had not an iota of discernable flavor at all. That is except for three huge slices of fresno chili which against the void apparently tasted like fire. I didn’t get one…there were three rounds and four of us. Sad garbage.
 

We were treated to a couple of desserts as we were celebrating recent nuptials. The flat flaky salt crystals atop the chocolate chip cookie offered a wee bit of redemption. The huge square of brown butter rice crispy treat needed a fair bit more nuttiness to call it brown butter. Our first meal in Chicago was by far our weakest…which means good things are to come!