We visited Steadfast back in October, 2016 and December, 2017. We enjoyed it both times, so it’s about time to take another look. One of their specialties is a whole, roasted duck and Valeria and I were in the mood for that. As it would turn out, we ordered other things, so let’s dive in.
I was impressed by Steadfast’s cocktail program on earlier visits. That is no surprise, as the restaurant is part of The Fifty/50 Restaurant Group which boasts famed mixologist Benjamin Schiller as Beverage Director. The Classic Cocktail list was a little shorter than last time, but no less focused on quality.
I ordered a Steadfast Manhattan.
As discussed multiple times in these pages, a Manhattan is a classic cocktail made simply with 2 oz of bourbon or rye whiskey, 1 oz of sweet vermouth, and a couple dashes of aromatic bitters, like the ubiquitous Angostura. However, the wide range of whiskeys, vermouths, and bitters available these days means you can change the flavor profile of the drink dramatically to suit your tastes.
Eagle Rare 10 is a bourbon from the prolific Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort, KY. It’s blended from whiskeys aged 9-10 years. Eagle Rare is a classic, beautiful bourbon (well, if you love bourbons, that is) with all the brown sugar, warm spices, oak, vanilla and other nuances you expect on the aroma and the flavor. You can drink it neat or with a splash of water and enjoy every nuance of the whiskey. At about $35/bottle (although this price can vary quite a bit depending on where you live and where you shop), it’s also a great bourbon for making cocktails.
Carpano Antica, is a Vermouth that is made using a recipe that is said to have been developed in 1786 by an Italian named Antonio Benedetto Carpano. It is a favorite of mine, as it is richer, deeper, and more complex than old favorites like Martini and Rossi or Noilly Prat. It makes a more interesting Manhattan, at least to my taste.
The most unusual component in the cocktail is pipe tobacco. No, there were no bits of tobacco floating around in the glass. The tobacco flavor is usually extracted either into the simple syrup (a 50-50 mixture of sugar and water) or a neutral alcohol base (e.g., vodka). As strange as it might sound to add tobacco to a cocktail, it is actually quite common to get tobacco-like aromas in bourbon and other whiskeys as well as in red wines, especially when the wines have aged for a while. To be clear, the aromas are of fresh tobacco, not burning tobacco.
While I did get hints of a sweet tobacco aroma in the drink, I can’t really be sure if I smelled it because I thought I should, or if I was just getting normal hints of tobacco from the ingredients that went into the drink.
Moving on to the dinner menu, its structure is pretty simple, but with a couple of special sections.
The Artisan Bread section is unique in the range of breads and spreads that you can chose from. Since there was only two of us, we took the small service. (The large service essentially gets you every bread and spread choice on the menu.)
As you can see, this is no ordinary bread basket. The Black Garlic Croissant (left) was the usual light, butter, flakey pastry, but with the added flavor of roasted black garlic and the sesame seed topping.
Black garlic is made by taking whole, unpeeled heads of garlic and letting them age under controlled conditions of low heat (around 140℉, and humidity. During the process, bacterial processes (fermentation) and thermal (heat) processes break down and combine certain chemicals in the garlic, turning it dark black and making each clove soft and sticky, similar to the feel of a date or prune. All of the “bite” of raw garlic is gone and you’re left with sweet, spreadable, cloves. It’s actually pretty easy to do at home, but it does take 2-4 weeks and apparently makes the whole house smell like garlic, which may sound wonderful or may sound awful, depending on how you feel about the aroma of garlic. I have friends who would wear Garlic Cologne if they could, and other friends (probably vampires) who can’t stand it.
Bolo Levedo (“yeast cake” in Portuguese) is a yeast bread from Portugal that is cooked on a griddle, very similar to an English Muffin. It can be savory or sweet. These savory examples were made with bits of mushroom, giving them an earthy (in a good way-like mushrooms) taste.
Pretzel bread is very popular, but it usually doesn’t come with an herb goat cheese stuffing and some roasted winter squash cubes on top. Since we love goat cheese, this was amazing.
We were given one flavored oil, a pickled vegetable, and two butters, to go with the bread.
Sometimes all you need with bread is some good olive oil to dip it in, but if you flavor the oil with garlic and saffron, you might be a chef (or a foodie).
We usually think of the ubiquitous white cauliflower (if we think of cauliflower all) but it actually grows in a variety of colors. I sometime see green and purple in my local grocery store. This violet colored version was lightly pickled and crunchy.
Oaxacan Butter (named for the state in Mexico the recipe comes from) is butter that has been flavored with raspberries, ground nuts, and chocolate (that is the mixture you see on top of the butter). In this case, some honey has been added the mix.
Finally, goat butter. Goat meat and milk once played a much bigger role in the food chain than they do these days, at least in most of the world, but like goat cheese, I love goat butter.
It’s up to you to mix and match the breads and the spreads (and pickle) as you like. Lots of restaurants offer a bread service of some kind, either as part of the meal or as a separate order, but the concept here at Steadfast is, as far as I know, unique in Chicago.
The Starter section of the menu includes some pretty unusual choices. Tuna Tartare is found on many menus these days, but Steak Tartare is pretty rare (no pun intended). Pasta Carbonara is pretty common, but making it with duck eggs and duck confit is definitely a creative twist. They also offer selections from their aging room, where they age their own meat, sausages, and cheeses under controlled temperature and humidity.
Somewhat unfortunately for this review, Valeria and I were both in the mood for just a salad, so we split the most pedestrian starter choice, a wedge salad.
The Wedge Salad is a classic that I have written about several times. Traditionally made with iceberg lettuce, gem lettuce used here. For me, the salad lives or dies on the quality and amount of the other ingredients, which typically include blue cheese, bacon, blue cheese crumbles, blue cheese dressing, tomatoes, and red onions. All were present in good amounts here, so this was a nice version.
By this time I had finished my Manhattan and needed one more cocktail to go with my entrée. I chose the Old Money, which I had first tried at Steadfast’s sister restaurant, Portsmith.
I didn’t know it when I was in Portsmith (also part of the Fifty/50 group) last year, but it was Benjamin Schiller who created this drink. You can read my analysis of the cocktail here, but, obviously, I wouldn’t have ordered it again if I didn’t think it was great.
As I mentioned up front, our intention was to order the Whole Roast Duck, which we have enjoyed here before.
There was a selection of three For the Table items on the menu, including Lobster Thermidor (which I had not seen before), the Whole Roast Duck (what we thought we were coming for), and a Dry Aged Ribeye. The duck and some special cut of dry-aged beef had been on the menu on previous visits, but this time the menu did not specify that they had been dry-aged in the restaurants own aging room. I meant to ask, but forgot.
After spending some time discussing the menu, however, we decided to go a different way. I ordered the Wagyu Bavette.
Most people, or at least most foodies, know about Wagyu beef by now. It is a species of Japanese cow that can produce meat with incredible amounts of marbling, or intramuscular fat. This is the kind of fat that is required for a prime cut of meat to be labeled “prime.” Some Wagyu beef, however, has so much intramuscular fat that, when you look at it, instead of meat streaked with a lot of fat, it looks like fat streaked with some meat. These cattle are now being grown lots of places outside of Japan, especially in the US and Australia.
Bavette, on the other hand, is a less clearly defined name for a cut of beef. It’s a French word that means “bib.” Apparently in France it usually refers to what we call a flank steak, but it can refer to other thin strips of meat. Restaurants and butchers in the US sometimes call flank steak or skirt steak “bavette,” but, more commonly, it is used as the name of a small cut from the lower part of the sirloin. It sits near the try-tip, another cut that is very popular on the West Coast, but less well known in the Midwest. Both the bavette and the try-tip are great cut to grill rare to medium-rare.
I believe this Wagyu Bavette was the sirloin cut, but, wherever on the cow it came from, it was tender and delicious. It had lots of great beef flavor that was complemented by the Bordelaise (red wine and beef stock) sauce.
Valeria chose to go with the Salmon Amandine.
As I have written previously, Ōra King Salmon is farm raised in New Zealand. As a rule, I avoid farm raised fish as too many farms are overcrowded, dirty, and focused on quantity, not quality, of fish. There are exceptions, and this product is one. It is served in Michelin-starred restaurants, such as Sepia and Oriole, and high-end sushi restaurants, such as Roka Akor, all in Chicago. These fish are bred in a clean, free-flowing, freshwater spring, then moved to the cool, clean water of the Marlborough Sound. You can see the fat marbling the fish in the image above. It has a rich salmon (not fishy) taste and an almost buttery texture. The fish was cooked to medium and topped with toasted almonds.
Delicata is one of our favorite winter squashes and we eat it frequently in the fall and early winter when it is in season. Interestingly, it is actually more closely related to the summer squashes (yellow squash, zucchini), but seems to occupy the middle ground between the hardness of an acorn or butternut squash and the tenderness of zucchini. I often just cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, and bake it like a winter squash. Unlike winter squash, however, the skin gets soft and edible.
Alternatively, you can slice the halved and seeded delicata into half moons as you see in the image above. It cooks more quickly this way, you get more browned surface (flavor!) and, again, you can eat it skin and all.
To finish up the plate, some broccolini and a couple of sauces/purées that look like they were made from the broccolini and the squash complete colorful, texturally varied, and flavorful presentation.
And so, Steadfast remains, well, steadfast. It flies a bit under the radar, as hotel restaurants often do, but my experience with restaurants in the Fifty/50 group has been uniformly very good. Give it a try. I’ll bet the roast duck is still excellent!
Steadfast
Address: 120 West Monroe Street, Chicago, IL 60603
Phone: (312) 801-8899
Reservations: opentable.com
Website: http://www.steadfastchicago.com/#index
Dress Code: Casual
Price Range: $30-50
Hours: Breakfast, Monday – Friday 7:00am – 11:00am
Lunch, Monday – Friday 11:00am – 3:00pm
Dinner, Monday – Friday 4:00pm – 10:00pm
Dinner. Saturday: 5:00pm – 10:00pm
Dinner, Sunday: 4:30pm – 8:30pm
Credit Cards: AMEX, Discover, MasterCard, Visa
Chicago, IL 60603
The author has no affiliation with any of the businesses or products described in this article.
All images were taken with a Sony Alpha a6500 camera and a Sony-Zeiss SEL1670Z Vario-Tessar T E 16-70mm (24-105mm full frame equivalent) F/4 ZA OSS lens or Sony 35mm (52mm full frame equivalent) F/1.8 E-Mount Lens using ambient light. Post-processing in Adobe Lightroom® and Adobe Photoshop® with Nik/Google and Skylum® Luminar® plugins.
