An interesting thing happened in Lincoln Square recently. And when it comes to restaurants, that’s a sentence one rarely hears about the neighborhood.
The Warbler raises concern just by offering these items—an apparent greatest hits of the banal bar food so many mediocre spots on the strip traffic in. But that’s the menu chef Ken Carter and his business partner, David Breo, have adopted for their more casual, inclusive sophomore restaurant. Carter is a chef who came into his own at Charlie Trotter’s near the denouement of that restaurant’s remarkable 25-year run. After that he clocked time downtown at the late Cibo Matto at the Wit. Four years ago, when he and Breo opened Gather, it was a place the neighborhood embraced for the chef’s upscale platings as much as for the burger, which also attracted people who didn’t even live in the neighborhood. I didn’t appreciate that burger at first, but I came around to it too.
Surprises like this made me wish I didn’t have to reserve digestive space for Carter’s meatier bites.
The sprawling menu is all focus at dessert, where there’s naught but a skillet cookie, a chocolate-peanut butter brownie, and a carrot cake so heroic it obviates the desire for any other choices. Sliced flat, it possesses a density more like quickbread than traditional leaden carrot cake. Its butter-pecan ice cream topknot is mined with massive chunks of praline, and it’s all doused in caramel sauce for a finish that transcends the middling reputation of this dessert archetype.
4533 N. Lincoln 773-681-0950thewarblerchicago.com
