A man in a black suit with an earpiece met us at the front door at Mordecai.
We’d missed the sign, but since he told us this with the cheerful demeanor of a prison guard—and without explaining why—we offered to exit and reenter next door through the Hotel Zachary. We wanted to do the right thing for Mordecai.
There are TVs above the bar too. In kindness, they’re mounted behind screens—which oddly doesn’t allow much close scrutiny of the game, calling into question their very purpose.
At the moment the menu is rife with such springlike seasonality—it might already have changed by the time you read this. You can insert your own cliches about the promise of spring baseball, but fresh morels, asparagus, and English peas will never get old. Wentworth dispatches the last in a vivid emerald-colored risotto, a platform for a thick slab of fatty porchetta, itself supporting charred carrot sticks. Tiny morels and shimeji mushrooms lurk amid tangles of arugula pappardelle tossed with a puree made from charred asparagus. Ramps figure again in a structure of roasted halibut and shrimp-stuffed agnolotti too rigid to match the tender fish.
3632 N. Clark 773-269-5410 mordecaichicago.com
