Results tagged “tapas”

    

When we walked into Eivissa, the Wells Street Art Festival was booming outside, the bar was four-deep with revelers and the giant front windows were opened onto the patio. The new Old Town tapas joint couldn’t have picked a better time to open, but we were more concerned with the food than the scene. We sheepishly begged for a seat in the back, and the hostess led us into a cool, cozy space, with giant wooden beams covering the ceiling. It evokes the feeling of a much older restaurant, the kind of hidden space that diners long to curl up in with a drink.

      

We love tapas and (since this author lives in the South Loop) we love to see good restaurants opening in the neighborhood. So, it’s possible that we were predisposed to like Mercat a la Planxa before we walked through the door. Chef Jose Garces' tapas outpost made Esquire's list of Best New Restaurants last year. On the other hand, Time Out Chicago's David Tamarkin decried Mercat's supposed "lack of soul," and there have been a fair share of mediocre reviews on Yelp, so we were interested to see how the place would stack up.

Mana Food Bar is exactly the kind of vegetarian restaurant Chicago needs. It’s small and intimate, has a very good alcohol selection, offers small versions of all its dishes for tasting and is relatively inexpensive. Oh, and did we mention that the food rocks?