Bread and Wine: Dinner Review

I was asked to help choose a restaurant for a friend's birthday. My parameters: it had to be nice, not too expensive, and generally satisfy the tastes of six different people. When old friends gather to eat, choosing a restaurant becomes as pleasant as splitting the check: which is to say unpleasant. And the birthday girl doesn't eat pork, seafood, or anything cooked below a medium well. I'm not kidding---once she had a friend microwave a pink roast into well-done submission for her. Which is how we ended up at Bread and Wine, one of the more aggressively inoffensive restaurants we've been to.

I'd read the Sun Times' Michael Nagrant describe it as the sort of restaurant that you would take non-foodies to when they're taking their first few baby steps into the world of overpaying for tiny plates of food. Everything from the menu (steak, chicken, pasta) to the interior (farm-to-table chic) screams "crowd pleaser." It's extremely hard to hate it, and it's extremely hard to be blown away by it.

Things do get started off strangely though. When I ask our waitress which is a better money sink, the chicken liver spread or the panna cotta, she gives me a look of surprise and recommends the latter, which I go along with. She then doesn't hear my attempt to order the carbonara and brings me the panna cotta out with everyone else's entrees. An ordinary enough mistake, and a sometime fault of my quiet ordering, but most fine dining restaurants would've added a gesture in addition to the apology. And when we discover the mistake, she says, "I'll set it aside for you," and I do a double take. The very least she could've done was pretend the chef would whip up a fresh one for me. So this too separates Bread and Wine from fine dining.

But come on, how does the food taste? The herb salad and ricotta crostini is a surprisingly nice starter for someone who likes neither ricotta nor salad. But it's got a nice nuttiness to the ricotta and a bright, spring flavor, though I come to this dish by way of one of my companions, who ordered it and hated it. The stinging nettle carbonara has good texture, but lacks the lightness of the best-handled heavy dishes. The accompanying lardons taste surprisingly like Chinese barbecue pork, in a way that I don't love, but the poached egg and hedgehog mushrooms are nicely done. However, the portion size has one of my dining companions, who ordered similarly, staring in dismay, and I don't blame him.

And finally, my butterscotch panna cotta. Even sitting too long, it is cool and jiggly and delicious and incredibly sweet in a way that definitely does not offend me. It's an indulgence and shows a dash of brave brio that I wish the rest of the menu showed. But mission accomplished: the birthday girl enjoyed it. So  without invoking the restaurant name too much, Bread and Wine is the place for a slow and gentle foodie conversion.

2.5/5 stars