One of the most absurdly delicious things I’ve eaten this winter was a humongous lump of deep-fried chicken breast with a core of molten cheese from Hot Star Large Fried Chicken, a Taiwanese chain with several outposts in and around Toronto and Los Angeles. It’s the kind of thing that blinds you to how truly bad for you it is until your greasy paws are empty, there’s cheese dripping down your chin, and you want to fall over and die.
Gillanders frequently pushes the right buttons, as with a quartet of black truffle croquettes encasing a matrix of gooey aged white cheddar and jalapeño and releasing a fungal ambrosia that rises to your nostrils. Lobster dumplings, sweet and snappy, bathe in a pool of “jade butter” colored with fermented jalapeño paste. Seared diver scallops mingle with maitake mushrooms in a dashi mounted with brown butter. Corn-bread madeleines slathered with olive-oil-whipped butter are so moist they barely make it to your mouth.
It’s the only taste of booze they’ll serve you at S.K.Y until the liquor license kicks in (estimated January 26), delayed due to the restaurant’s proximity to a church. That’s just one of the struggles Gillanders and company have had to contend with since opening. The restaurant has been targeted by an aggressive anti-gentrification campaign familiar to both old and new residents of Pilsen. In spite of it, Gillanders is working well and making his way on this small stretch of 18th Street, along with three other prominent new Asian restaurants (HaiSous, Cà Phê Dá, and Furious Spoon). In a perfect world creative people wouldn’t have to compete with each other in order to express themselves—it would just be the kind of internal struggle that produces good work. Change happens, for better and for worse. v
1239 W. 18th 312-846-1077skyrestaurantchicago.com
