Review Mon Oct 26 2009

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain at Market

I made it over to Market, a restaurant that doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. The place is a combination of a sports bar full of flat-screens with a separate dining area that looks very modern and high-end. The food, however, is a dimension unto itself--not because it's bold or memorable, but because it's served in the weirdest contraptions that not even the most serious of psychedelic drug users could have conceived.

I ordered "The Answer," one of the strangest names for a steak sandwich (or "sandwedge," as Market's menu faux-cleverly refers to them). The actual sandwich itself was served on a wooden cutting board. The fries that accompanied it were in a European-style cone that was stuck into a wrought iron stand (similar to what you suspend bananas from to avoid ripeness) that arced over the sandwich, with small ramekins of ketchup and aioli set into side bars that made me think this was a fuck swing for side dishes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another diner eating a pasta dish--a little grater that would have fit perfectly in a Cabbage Patch Doll's kitchen also hung on a device similar to the hardship that my fries were enduring, comically waiting to cover her rigatoni with a snowstorm of parmesan.

I spent a good half of my meal trying to get through several tough, rubbery chunks of skirt steak before I finally gave up and asked for a take-home container. To their credit, Market has awesome take-home containers.

Things got even weirder when dessert for the group of us in attendance was wheeled out--in a small grocery cart filled with caramel and cheese corn, and topped with a small aquarium-sized dollop of cotton candy. While the cart's wheels made for easy passing of the mountain of pure sugar that we were all giddily eating, I still came back to the same questions: who makes miniature grocery carts that double as serving dishes? Why all the visual fuss over the average-tasting food? Why did the bar, restaurant and food have such a huge disconnect? The silent cab ride home provided little guidance, my leftover Answer getting colder by the minute.

Market
1113 W. Randolph
312-989-4787

— Robyn Nisi / Comments (2)