I have to open the conversation about Ruxbin by talking about a newer restaurant, Parachute. Like Ruxbin, it’s helmed by a chef of Korean descent who is proficient in classical French techniques, whose last name is Kim, and who uses Korean ingredients as points of inspiration but then takes dishes in imaginative ways not bound by geopolitical borders. That restaurant shot out of the gate as a critics’ darling and sustained itself by word-of-mouth, and those who brazenly walked in on weekends endured hourlong-plus waits. To top that, the editors at Bon Appetit flew in and declared it one of America’s best new restaurants. Dream street.
Nearly everything about the rise of Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark’s Parachute these past 18 months mirrored what happened five years ago to Edward Kim’s Ruxbin. His Noble Square BYOB restaurant (he’s unrelated to Beverly) rode the upward trajectory. It didn’t take reservations, and waits were long. Chatter from national tastemakers was considerable. Except — and here’s the difference — much of the attention focused on Ruxbin’s novelty. The lead paragraph of any write-up always mentioned the restaurant’s beguilingly funky interior, which looked as if it were cobbled from an abandoned public school on the bulldozing line (seat-belt straps on banquettes, photography darkrooms for bathrooms).
What got lost was Kim’s cooking — his pedigree included a stop at Thomas Keller’s Per Se — and that fact got further buried as the grand opening buzz moved to the next flavor of the month. Among Chicago restaurants, Ruxbin settled into the cruising lane of, “Yeah I love the place, but have you checked out that new …”
On the occasion of its fifth birthday in November, Ruxbin is ready, once again, for its coming-out party. In restaurant years, Ruxbin has entered first-suit-jacket, car rental-eligible adulthood. Gone is the a la carte menu, and in its place, a $65 tasting that allows diners to curate any five of 12 dishes. The BYOB policy remains, but reservations are now accepted, making weekend dining here less of a crapshoot.
What makes Ruxbin a fascinating restaurant to revisit is the quiet confidence exhibited by the kitchen. Unlike Parachute, where the cooking is more punchy and overt (bacon fat in its bing bread, a hot pot with crab and beef marrow broth), Ruxbin’s food is layered with subtlety and scholarship; Kim’s dishes are composed more as ensemble acts than marquee billings.
The element of surprise is an underutilized trait in food, and several courses employ unexpected ingredients cooked in unexpected ways. A block of carrot doesn’t sound particularly sexy, but here it’s charred to black, with onion ash and preserved lemon, and laid upon a goat milk tahini as rich as bearnaise sauce. The resulting “Carrot Steak” is satisfyingly meaty for a dish with none. Another vegetarian course, the jackfruit carnitas, made me do double takes — deep bows to whoever made the connection that jackfruit, a fibrous fleshy tropical fruit, could be crisped into savory porklike shreds and paired with creamy grits and smoked tomato gravy.
Clearly, these are chefs more focused on finesse and understatedness than the whiz-bang school of cooking. Their attention to texture, especially in playing off opposites, offers many sensory pleasures — crisp cubes of unctuous pork belly against toothsome smoked oysters, or a tender carrot cake with cotton candy wisps, crisp ginger chip and goat cheese ice cream. Scallops and shrimp are cooked to a creamy medium, accentuating the dish’s sea sweetness alongside eggplants and horseradish pommes puree. And there is, thankfully, little room for seasonal cliches: Instead of traveling the path of autumnal spiced banality, a dish of seared venison is unexpectedly paired with persimmons, pomegranate duck jus and a risotto of ramen noodles.
You could surmise I like this grown-up version of Ruxbin a lot. The lightness and buoyancy to the vegetable-predominant dishes are particularly attractive when they’re competing against heavy stews and starch-rich food on seasonal menus elsewhere. But what other restaurants would find hard to replicate is that Ruxbin, in the true sense of the word, is a neighborhood restaurant, and a restaurant of its neighborhood.
I was struck seeing zurek, the Polish sourdough soup, as a component in the chickpea pierogi. Noble Square has long been a Polish community, and here I was, in this rummage-sale fantasy room, dining on an old church pew, experiencing the delicate dumpling cloud, with the Eastern European spicing of caraway seeds, dill and sauerkraut. This, coming from a Korean-American chef inspired by the neighbors he serves, a chef who will use ssamjang paste and foie gras and empanadas on the same menu, is perhaps a sign that Ruxbin is at present the most Chicago restaurant in Chicago. There is good reason to give it another go.
Twitter @pang
Ruxbin
851 N. Ashland Ave.
312-624-8509
Tribune rating: 3 stars
Open: Dinner Tuesday to Saturday
Prices: $65 for five courses, $12 a person for extra dishes
Reservations: Accepted online
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Ratings key: 4 stars, outstanding; 3 stars, excellent; 2 stars, very good; 1 star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. The reviewer makes every effort to remain anonymous. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.
