Community Tavern

This one hurts.

Have you ever seen a menu that absolutely convinces you of the thoughtfulness and the quality of the food? That is Community Tavern. It is Asian-inspired, with dishes that check all of the ingredient boxes. Thai basil all over the menu, including the cocktail list, XO sauce in the short rib dumplings, charred butternut squash in the chili udon, spicy miso in the cream cheese gnudi. This is exactly the type of menu that speaks to me, sings even.

Going to places with good food, authentically cooked for their respective cuisines can obviously make for a great experience. But the menus that inspire me are those that veer from standard preparations of well-known dishes and take on the risk of using excellent ingredients to make curious and interesting food. Kimchi and Merkts cheddar in the kim-cheese fries. BBQ pork ribs, but with ginger-lemongrass caramel, thai basil, and fried garlic. Charred carrots and sweet chili in a mung bean Vietnamese crepe.

There ought to be more restaurants doing exactly this type of thing. Frankly, if I weren't such an amateur, it is how I wish I could cook at home. Forget the books, remember the methods, embrace fresh and interesting ingredients, and make something different. Blend cultures. Follow some rules, but break a lot of them, too.

Community Tavern is obviously doing this, of course with an emphasis on Asian ingredients, and this will be a relatively rare instance of me propping up their rating and my review because of it. When you dine out, you are almost always a prisoner to circumstance. You can only order so much food, what you choose depends some on what you order for the entire table, whether you are sharing dishes with the group or another person, what you might be craving, how badly you want to try something versus how comfortable you want to be about what you choose, so on and so forth.

We chose some combination of all of the above. We ordered the kim-cheese fries for the table, a round of oysters for the group, and my fiancée and I shared the cheeseburger and crispy rice noodles. The oysters were oysters, the kim-cheese fries were good but for being a bit kimchi and cheese heavy in some spots and sparse in others, and the crispy rice noodles were excellent.

The burger, however, was terrible. I was coming off a week of being sick, so I was desperately trying to excuse away this issue, but I could taste everything else and my fiancée - healthy as could be - had the same reaction. By now you should be thinking, "you ordered the fucking burger after just lauding all of the Asian-inspired dishes, you are an idiot." Of course, you would be right, but it is on the fucking menu, and it is very well-reviewed in Chicago food circles. More than that, on a menu full of "risks", it sort of has to be the simple win.

I have reached deep into my pocket to give them an extra half-star to account for all the factors described above, but in a vacuum, the burger quality made this a two-star experience. The staff were great, the vibe of the place was, well, communal, and I just can't stomach giving them two stars on the basis of my choices. It will be the perfect place to revisit, hoping to affirm that this was a function of my choices rather than the menu as a whole, and I am anxious to see what my response to this review brings after doing so.

Don't expect this sort of leniency for most other places, but please appreciate my willingness to allow contextual influence to my reviews when it is convenient to me.