Totally Jjigae With It*
(*apologies to all of Korea and Will Smith)
Hotels are where restaurants go to die and steakhouses are where those who have already died inside go to dine. Open a steakhouse in a hotel and you might as well just load a Tesla X frunk up with bushels of cash and drive it in to the Divvy-bike infested waters of Lake Michigan.
While it’s true I’m biased against the steakhouse as a concept, I’m sort of just joking about the folks who dine there. Beef is one of the great satiating luxuries of the world. If that wasn’t true, Impossible Foods would not have been able to raise over 2 billion in capital to support their research to deliver a “real” beef experience to the hardest boiled of vegans and vegetarians.
A well dry-aged bone-in-ribeye is undeniable.
I also know the margins on that meat, and the experience of overpaying for it is almost a cliché at this point. Some gigantic platter will be wheeled out or bicep-curled by your waist-coated server and they will Vanna White the cuts one by one….
“It would be a mis-steak not to order this Chateaubriand!”
“No meaty-ocre meat here!”
“This cut is like your spouse admitting they’re wrong: exceedingly rare!”
Even though most of the meat comes from the same few purveyors, the waiter, who is ultimately a salesperson will find Mad Men-level ways to differentiate the hunks sometimes making substandard conventions sound like next-level innovation.
“Grain-fed!”
“Wet-Aged!”
If you’re on a date, the server will prey on your vanity suggesting that only the greatest of lovers would dare not order the tomahawk for two for $300.
There is one argument for dining at a steakhouse worth considering which also recalls an old steakhouse joke…
How do you like your steak cooked?
By someone else!
Since I have a heroin-level DoorDash problem these days, I get that. But, also I do love to cook, and steak at home is something I’ve mastered. I’m also deeply at peace with not paying $15 for sautéed spinach.
Big steak also acts like a class system, assessing the level of hospitality they’ll bestow on you based on the wrist-bling you’re flashing, the Tom Ford loafers you’re sporting, or the price of the bottle you’re ordering.
Architecturally, steakhouses fall in to only a few camps: clubby mid-century mahogany-wooded man muskiness that reeks of Jon Hamm’s ball-sweat, or the ring-a-ding Vegas glitz, the black lacquer and red leather banquettes that once tickled Rat Pack taint. There’s also a vaguely swinging spacey Eero Saarinen-airport-design-like movement making its way through modern meat-emporiums.
As a food writer who’s looking for new directions, voice, and innovation, there is often very little to learn about cuisine or culture at a steakhouse except that QR code wine lists are hot.
I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush though. I have always loved Bavette’s for its immersive time travel experience and broad menu. Boeufhaus offers egalitarian hospitality no matter your actual station, and their attention to technique and craft is artisan relative to the commodity-tactics of the big guns. El Che is also a favorite because it’s a deeply personal love letter to John Manion’s South American childhood, and also because no one does the custardy smoky sweetbreads and Italian beef empanadas like they do.
I’ve noticed something else about the El Che/Brasero team, which is that when they open a spot they make a heavy investment in “friends and family” pre-opening dinners. I’m not talking about one night for a bunch of influencers to court coverage, but about hosting multiple dinners with iteration, where the team processes feedback heavily, and when they open on day one, they are honoring your dollar.
What I recently saw on social media and from listening to a few interviews with Thomas Oh and Andrew Lim the partners behind the Perilla restaurants (and also partners on the very cool hospitality-related podcast En Process) is a similar spirit. This is definitely one of the benefits of partnering with a hotel group as they have with Perilla Steak, aka bigger budgets to do things like train and refine before opening.
Right of course is a matter of opinion. Wright, however, as in Frank Lloyd Wright is not, which is to say he was a certifiable design genius, or at least a fantastic modern interpreter of Japanese aesthetics through a booming American lens.
Now Perilla Steak’s dining room is not a Wright-design. But his principles are very much at play here. I especially like rolling in through the cramped old-school revolving door under the dark low slung compressed ceiling from where you are then whisked into a (expiration of breath) soaring double-height room with long horizontal light-wood surfaces, wicker-backed club chairs with rusty red cushions, stained-glass-trimmed clerestory windows, and a color palette straight out of the S.C. Johnson company offices.
The centerpiece of the bar-area dining room is a mixture of connected saucers and orbs that reminds me of the Golden Rondelle theatre Wright designed for the 1964-65 World’s Fair.
There is nothing I love more than killing a forty of OB or Hite lager sucking down two hundred plates of banchan while accidentally burning the shit out of my kalbi because I’m too hammered to find the tongs to move it to my plate.
But I am also a rules follower, and I prefer to sometimes have the absence of fear of smoking a place out and forcing CFD to arrive. If somehow the crew from Chicago Fire came that would be ok, because I would love to tell David Eigenberg how much I adored him as Steve Brady on Sex in the City.
That Perilla Steak’s service staff actually lubes up their table-side grills with beef tallow and cooks everything for you with deep char marks and perfectly on-temp is baller convenient.
Prior to the server’s arrival giant gold spoons, a set of industrial shears, the kind that can cut you out of your steel-toed combat boots in a medical emergency, and a giant set of tweezer/tongs (twongs? Tweezongs?), which feel like a taunt to the molecular-gastro-practicing tweezer jockey set is placed on the table. It’s sort of feels like what Jeff Bezos sees at his boutique dentist during a tooth extraction, before you realize these are the grilling implements.
Now I know some derivatives traders have all been online kvetching about portion sizes, but the 8 oz sets with banchan including an addictive fizzy “white” kimchi, sauces and lettuce wraps is eminently fair given the show and the quality of the meat.
You don’t even have to go for the expensive cuts. My favorite selection off the “premium” set ($75) was the marinated prime short rib (you can order an additional portion of this cut for just $30). My current hot take is that after a couple bites (not Perilla’s which is great) a lot of wagyu starts feeling like you’re giving manual liposuction to a particularly juicy-assed human.
The point of Perilla Steak however is not the meat, but the innovative Korean-heritage infused voice of partners Oh and Lim. If you’re not supplementing the BBQ with the other stuff, you’re doing it wrong.
Carb-lovers shouldn’t pass up on the cacio e pepe that subs in rice cake or tteok for pasta noodles. A lot of places serve up the fatty sausage fingered cakes, but the ones from Lim and his crew are lithe and loopy like bucatini. The cacio sauce is bright with acidity and riding an almost chili-pepper like fire.
The Korean Fried Chicken isn’t some bucket of poultry re-tread, it’s a half Harrison Farms chicken deep fried and coated with thick cracklin’ skin rife with soy garlic glaze sporting a tangy heat. It’s remarkable that the wing, the breast, and the leg meat are somehow equally juicy to the bone despite being fried on the bone together.
Kimchi fried rice arrives, a bubbly cauldron with a jiggly egg which is jauntily breached and tossed by your server. The grains glistening with yolk are distinct and rich, popping with fermented acidity from spicy kimchi ribbons and blue cheese, and larded with crisp guanciale batons.
Thomas Oh might just be the dude working your table. A guy like this doesn’t have to do the hands-on work, especially since his extended team is as consistently cordial, approachable and generous as he is. Nonetheless Oh was touching tables with grace all night.
Maybe one of the best cocktails on the menu to cut through the sweet chicken and spicy rice is a “Sticky Rice Martini”, high-proof rhum agricole, gentian root, vermouth mélange, fino, black lemon, and vintage barrel aged fermented tea. Though there is no sake in it, it has a clean minerality like the very best high-polish rice wines and does indeed channel a pinch of floral sticky rice.
Honestly one of the only criticisms I had of the night was of the “egg souffle” featuring Korean chili flake and sesame. It is what it says it is, a jiggly cloud of egg, but it needed more salt. While it didn’t need to be sweet, I almost wanted it to be. Like what if the kitchen spiked the curd with a little Makgeolli to make like a Korean answer to Japanese tamagoyaki?
Perfectly sweet was an ideal square of moist carrot cake licked with persimmon jam, strewn with crisp cashew streusel swizzled in gojuchang caramel sidled up next to a quenelle of ginger ice cream.
I heard on a recent Joiners podcast that with Perilla Steak, one of the things Oh and Lim wanted to channel was their experience as young restaurant workers saving up their own money to have a baller steakhouse moment.
I fundamentally believe that’s what they’re doing here in a very personal and exciting way. Perilla Steak has a universal level of hospitality that makes not only a jaded pro like me satisfied, but also equally delivers for the two groups that sat near me, an older Korean couple who knows where all the kimchi is buried, and a four-top family from Columbus who stumbled in without a reservation desperate and hungry only to have their faces light up with joy in the middle of the table-side grilling theatre.
I have always believed that if you travel, you should really try to go beyond the tourist traps, to find the essence of the place. It’s fine to have a Big Mac at the base of the CN tower in Toronto, but if you find your way to Anna Roti house in nearby Scarborough, your trip is gonna get a lot more delicious and enlightening.
Maybe one of the things I hate about the standard steakhouse is that it promotes a sameness. The number of people I’ve met who dined at the now closed Ruth’s Chris in Chicago while here on vacation when they have a Ruth’s Chris steakhouse in their own hometown is sadly much higher than it should be.
Perilla Steak can deliver on these folks’ expectations while also blowing their minds and opening them to a comforting bowl of kimchi jjigae or some of the world’s best uses of fermentation. Because of that, I hope and believe that Perilla Steak will be the exception that you CAN successfully run an engaging steakhouse on the bottom floor of a hotel.
Perilla Steak is located at 225 N. Wabash in Chicago
I like to think about this with a music analogy. High traffic touristy areas are like big music venues that only the most popular acts can fill, so we get the McDonald's and the Olive Gardens. You usually need to go a little bit off the beaten path (smaller venues) for your ethnic cuisines (folk music) and more adventurous restaurants (art music). A lot of expensive restaurants are in the last category (this is where the analogy maybe doesn't quite work), but steakhouses are the prime examples of high-end "popular food".
I really do want to try Perilla Steakhouse. I imagine this is like if a K-pop star pulled a Harry Styles and played what they wanted instead of whatever management thought would sell the most.
As part of a steakhouse family, I appreciate your puns. I may use one or two (with credit, of course.) I now want to try Perilla 1000% and welcome them to the steakhouse family in Chicago. 👌