Cindy’s
Location: 13th floor (take the elevator)
Hours: 3 p.m.-2 a.m. daily (3 a.m. Saturdays), with weekend brunch hours beginning in mid-July. Email cindysinfo@chicagoathletichotel.com for reservations.
Good for: A cocktail with an Instagram-worthy view, a group dinner when someone else is buying
Named for Cindy Pritzker, the hotel’s rooftop restaurant “was designed to look like and mimic a Michigan beach house,” said executive chef Christian Ragano. It does feel airy and beachy, with a greenhouse-style glass ceiling arching over picnic table-style seating and counters set with chunky wooden stools. (Watch out for the three-footed stools lining the communal tables, which I and nearly everyone nearby almost tipped over upon sitting down.)
The all-local draft list is a nice touch–great to see new Pilsen brewery Moody Tongue’s lemon saison on tap–until you see that pints are all $9 a pop and you’re grossly overpaying for Bell’s Oberon ale. That’s the rooftop tax at work, my friends.
If you’re paying for the view, at least it’s a breathtaking one that I’d venture to call the best in the city. The outdoor part of the restaurant is a balcony set with loungey seating around fire pits; if already filled with reservations, there’s a drink rail where you can pop out and take a photo or two after ordering from the bar inside. Take in the panoramic view of the lake, Millennium and Grant parks and the Museum Campus; though you can’t see Navy Pier proper, Mason said the Wednesday and Friday night fireworks are in full view.
The cocktail menu (most drinks are $14) comes courtesy of Nandini Khaund, an alumna of The Violet Hour. (Cindy’s has side-stepped the whole bartender-versus-mixologist debate by calling her Spirit Guide.) She has a penchant for oddball ingredients, which works in drinks such as the Aegean Sea–a gin martini-esque sipper with a touch of pine syrup and an edible caper leaf in the bottom of the glass–but goes haywire in the We’ll Always Have Paris. The “Casablanca”-inspired pistachio milk-based drink with gin, strawberries, cardamom and date syrup features a sprinkling of crushed rose petals that makes the last few sips taste like a dry mouthful of potpourri. A good pick for the less adventurous is the Kick in the Daisy, a riff on a margarita made with watermelon juice that’s available by the glass or for a group in one of the gold-spigoted apothecary jars behind the bar ($250 for about 20 drinks).
The small-plates movement has me conditioned to assume that “shareable” automatically translates into lots of small portions, but Cindy’s shareable “platters” menu is the opposite–oversized family-style dishes with big prices to match. Following the beach house inspiration, “usually there’s a whole bunch of people around one table … you’re doing boils and bakes beach-side, fish fries, big piles of food,” said Ragano, the son of Italian and German immigrants who, growing up in Queens, never saw a family gathering that wasn’t centered around an abundance of food. “It’s almost the antithesis of the small-plates revolution. … Instead of having 15 plates in front of a party of four people, it’s a little bit easier to order, say, three dishes–a salad, an entree and a side–and there’s plenty of food.”
As a party of two, my friend and I were hit with the sticker shock–$72 Frogmore stew (essentially a crab boil), $28 for roasted clams and $34 for meatballs–hard and fast. The discovery that you can get half orders of many dishes saved us from overspending; it’s not noted on the menu, but just ask your server. When halved from $26 to $13, burrata with bits of broccoli rabe, spicy salami and tomatoes to slather on toast is pretty reasonable for two, and a half order of the Boston bibb salad with addictive green goddess dressing ($8 instead of $16) was still a comically large heap of lettuce.
Still, I was disappointed that there’s nothing truly small and snacky in sight–hey, even a $7 bowl of nuts or olives would seem like a steal. Mason said a lighter late-night menu will debut soon, which could be a start. Even so, I get it. Rooftops don’t serve up deals because frankly they don’t need to–and that’s why they’re the kind of places you visit once a summer instead of once a week.
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Reporters visit restaurants unannounced and meals are paid for by RedEye. lmarnett@redeyechicago.com | @redeyeeatdrink
