Johnny Be Good*

I might be the only person in Chicagoland who had a disappointing meal at John’s Food and Wine in Lincoln Park last year.

Unlike Il Carciofo which has been getting tough love from all sides including (remarkably) influencers, it’s tough to find a single food enthusiast other than myself who didn’t love John’s.

That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. One of my good friends who dined with me likes to text that “We’re the only people in the world who didn’t like John’s!”.

Since my initial visit, John’s introduced a tasting menu as well as reservations.

These changes solved a lot of the concerns I had early on, i.e. you didn’t have to huddle in the tiny lobby staring people down at the bar with gazer beam eyes hoping to shame them into freeing up a seat for you.

If you get the tasting menu at John’s, you also no longer have to stand in the front of the restaurant debating with your friends about whether their recent Jello-fast can be accommodated before placing an order and getting a QR code that allows you to order additional drinks mid-meal. I totally get QR codes as a function of convenience. I love them for a stadium hot dog and a quick service burrito, but not for a sit-down dinner.

But things change.

Or do they?

The first weekend I could snag a reservation I did. We showed up to a desperate throng of neighborhood regulars who didn’t see the Instagram post from John’s that they’d shifted to a reservations model for the dining room.

Bar seats were still first-come first-serve, but they’d been sealed up by 5:30 pm. About twenty people thronged the host stand desperately pleading as they stared into an empty dining room full of flickering candles that looked as though it had experienced The Rapture.

My wife and I, rich with a reservation forded the Red Sea of table-desiring desperation and sat down to our meal. I felt bad for the folks who didn’t get the memo but was relieved not to have to wait. This is how Timothée Chalamet must feel all the time.

Old school tasting menus often have an amuse course. John’s being iconoclastic got straight down to business with a gratis pour of sparkling Valldolina Brut Nature Cava instead.

I’ll take bubbles over a one biter anytime, especially if it’s as creamy and yeasty as this glass, the perfect accompaniment to course one, John’s lobster salad served like caviar or a royal helping of oysters on crushed ice, a mound of herbs and what felt like a half lobster’s worth of succulent meat enrobed in melted leek aioli with a touch of lifting fish sauce vinaigrette.

This was my favorite course last time I ate at John’s. But, just as I got excited my wife took her first bite, wrinkled her nose and pulled out a tiny bit of cartilage.

Oh man, here we go…