Reviews: Bar Toma and Vera

ITALIA, ESPAÑA, AND YOU: Tony Mantuano tackles Italian at Bar Toma, and Liz and Mark Mendez make a marriage proposal to Spain, making both the right restaurants at the right time

By Jeff Ruby
This article appears in the February 2012 issue of Chicago Magazine.

Vera

Vera’s paella with rabbit thigh, duck confit, duck chorizo, and pickled chilies. Photograph: Anna Knott

Vera loves to push the ham and sherry, especially together, and my crew learned the raw power of that pairing when one of us knocked a glass of Bodegas Tradicion Palomino Palo Cortado onto a plate of Spanish meats. A masterstroke. The nutty, lemony flavor soaked directly into thin layers of Fermin iberico and Cinco Jotas iberico, enriching both food and drink to ridiculous levels. The sledgehammer approach finally knocked some sense into me. “If I have to give sherry away to make people understand it goes with the food, I’ll do that,” says Liz Mendez, a partner with her husband, chef Mark Mendez.

That shouldn’t be necessary. People have discovered Vera—the 58-seat Spanish hub named for Mark’s grandmother—and its Euro-heavy wine list full of adventurous value-fixated selections. The lifelong dream of the Mendezes (veterans of Carnivale), Vera, like Bar Toma, qualifies as the right restaurant at the right time, and—under the el a few blocks from the Randolph Street circus—it’s close to being in the right place.
The storefront feels much warmer than when it housed Rushmore: Earth tones and Edison lights sift a golden glow onto diners. I can think of worse places to be than at the walnut-topped cheese bar/“action station,” watching the pleasant gentleman painstakingly slice a supine pig while I swish an amontillado around and nosh on Hooligan, a cow’s milk cheese ingeniously paired with Madeira-soaked raisins.

THE SKINNY

VERA 1023 W. Lake St.; 312-243-9770
FYI Don’t overlook less sexy bites, like roasted cauliflower studded with goat cheese and pecans.
TAB $15 to $50
HOURS Dinner Tue. to Sun.

Tab does not include alcohol, tax, or tip.

Mark Mendez’s menu is not a love letter to Spain. It’s a marriage proposal. Punchy dishes, like anchovies with pickled garlic and red pepper flakes and marjoram-dusted roasted mushrooms with puréed ’shroom sauce, bottle España’s big flavors in a way few in Chicago have. A stunning paella is alternately crisp and toothy, stocked with tender rabbit and duck and bursting with spicy vinegar from pickled jalapeño and Fresno chilies. Mendez even coaxes juice out of tapas standbys like papas bravas (crunchy and creamy) and grilled octopus with grainy pimentón sauce (soft, smoky). “They’re small plates, but my small may not be somebody else’s small,” he says.

The best example of the largess is a $3 chicken liver with baffling proportions. Two little caramelized-onion toast points sag under an obscene amount of impeccable liver, like a weightlifter with a sculpted torso and grandfather legs.

Which brings me to the Vera bread conundrum. People are bound to protest the lack of free bread, like they did at Girl & the Goat, and The Bristol before that—and this time we’re talking about Spain, where soaking up sauces with bread is a national sport. “Bread costs more than people realize,” says Mark Mendez. “For a small place like Vera to survive, I have to be careful with my costs.”

That’s the only acceptable answer. If it means that I can still get a gluttonous portion of chicken liver for $3, then I’ll do without bread. Or I’ll just pay the $6 for the delicious sourdough served with three outstanding butters—garlic, duck crackling, and goat—to help keep restaurants like Vera in business. The bread just so happens to be wonderful too.

 

Chi-town and chorizo

At Vera, Mendez blends Spanish brio, local charm

The paella with duck chorizo, shredded rabbit confit and pickled chilies is the only dish on the menu that costs more than $12. (Chris Walker/Chicago Tribune)

Phil VettelFood critic

January 5, 2012

Vera is a Spanish restaurant that feels like a local pub. That's not a complaint.

Though the menu bulges with Iberico hams, Manchego cheese and Spanish chorizo, the sense of place emanating from the unpretentious restaurant is sweet home, Chicago.

Part of the reason is Vera's gritty-chic, urban-postcard location, a filmmaker's-dream corner storefront under the "L" tracks, remote-looking even though it's just a block north of Randolph Street's bustling restaurant row. Another part is chef/owner Mark Mendez, a lifelong Chicagoan whose Bridgeport roots are apparent every time he speaks.

But it's mostly because, at its heart, Vera, named for the chef's grandmother (with an oblique nod to pimenton de la Vera, a Spanish smoked paprika that figures into several menu items), is a neighborhood hangout in an area studded with star chefs.

"Lot of cool chefs here," Mendez says. "Grant (Achatz, of Next) is a block away, Stephanie (Izard, of Girl & the Goat) is a block away, Jared Van Camp (of yet-to-open Nellcote) is a block away. Curtis Duffy's coming to this neighborhood too. Our location is a little deserted, but there's street parking. We had a valet, but he never came back after a few days because nobody used him."

That could change, as word of this 3-month-old restaurant spreads.

Quite a few people have found this modest spot; Mendez developed a following with his fine work at Carnivale the last few years. Leaping from Latin America to Spain wasn't difficult, the chef says. "I wanted to get to more simply presented and prepared stuff, get away from the 30-ingredient mole. I joke that it's an older-man thing; I just want to do a few dishes really well."

Vera is the kind of place where you can drop in after work for a quick ham, cheese and sherry snack, or order a half-dozen small plates and a bottle of wine and settle in for the night. Either way, you're not going to drop a lot of coin here: Nearly everything on the menu is $12 or less and, apart from the premium Iberico ham (there are more modest charcuterie available), the only item that costs more than $15 is the paella ($26), and that will serve at least two.

That paella is terrific, by the way, a game-rich version that comes across as a sort of rice-based cassoulet. The paella, redolent of garlic, onions and tomatoes, is loaded with chunks of duck chorizo (made in-house), shredded rabbit confit and pickled chilies, and topped with overlapping slices of roasted duck.

Work your way up to that with an assortment of smaller plates. Start with the $3 nibble of chicken liver and caramelized onions, laid in fat slabs over two toast squares, and go ahead and pop for the $6 plate of warm bread with olive oil and three compound butters: garlic, duck cracklin (butter combined with duck fat — mad genius) and chive. I miss the white-anchovy butter Mendez was offering a month ago but the chive is a very nice alternative.

Crudo — perhaps fluke, perhaps Kona Kampachi — comes brightened with Valencia-orange puree and some chili oil. Black cod, with olivada and cippolini onions, is nicely done, as is the cocoa-dusted foie gras, drizzled with reduced Pedro Ximenez syrup. But most of the knockout dishes are vegetables, including roasted mushrooms in thyme and marjoram, roasted beets with valdeon (a creamy Spanish blue cheese) and pistachios, and a wonderful puree of butternut and kuri squash with honey and marcona almonds.

There is but one dessert on the menu, a white-chocolate candy bar with almonds and orange zest. It's a nice sweet, but Vera needs more options.

Mendez's wife, Elizabeth, runs the dining room and assembled the restaurant's Euro-focused wine list and a well-curated assortment of sherries. "She does a lot more than I do," jokes the chef. She also has done a good job training the staff, most of whom can match sherries to plates (a great experience, if you've never tried it) with practiced ease.

Vera doesn't accept reservations, but, largely because of the relatively simple preparations, food arrives quickly and table waits aren't interminable. And if they happen to be, the small-plate dishes make great bar food.

Vera

1023 W. Lake St., 312-243-9770, verachicago.com

Tribune rating: Two stars
Open: Dinner Monday-Sunday
Prices: Small plates $3-$15
Credit cards: A, DC, DS, M, V
Reservations: Not accepted
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Other: Wheelchair accessible

Ratings key: 
Four Stars: Outstanding
Three Stars: Excellent
Two Stars: Very good
One Star: Good
No stars: Unsatisfactory

Reviews are based on no fewer than two visits. The reviewer makes every effort to remain anonymous. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.

Vera a refreshing touch of Spain in the West Loop

By MICHAEL NAGRANT diningout@suntimes.com December 7, 2011 5:58PM

• 
  

The crispy-crusted bread at Vera will set you back $6, but the killer accomapaniment of roasted garlic, duck crackling and goat butters are worth the price. | RICHARD A. CHAPMAN ~ SUN-TIMES

VERA ★★★½

1023 W. Lake;

(312) 243-9770; verachicago.com 

Hours: Open 5 p.m. — 12 a.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 5 p.m. to 11 p.m Sunday;

Prices: cheese and ham plates $9-$30; shared small plates $4-$26;

Try: Cinco Jotas ham, escabeche, squash puree, house-made bread, and paella.

In a bite: The ultimate neighborhood restaurant run by a caring husband and wife serving pitch-perfect, Spanish-inflected cuisine and incredibly affordable and quaffable wines with names you might not know, but flavor you won’t forget.

KEY: ★★★★ Extraordinary; 
★★★ Excellent; ★★ Very Good; 
★ Good; Zero stars: Poor

ARTICLE EXTRAS

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As a writer, there are things you have to cover and things you want to cover. Kith and Kin restaurant in Lincoln Park was one of those subjects that defied professional obligation. It became a lair that I relished in same the way that a thousand old Chicago journalists once revered the Billy Goat Tavern.

But greatness often burns its candle at both ends, and this year Kith and Kin imploded shortly after a furious chef/owner feud. With restaurants, the food and the room it’s served in are highly perishable. When a favored restaurant shutters, devoted patrons just get burned. Thankfully, salving the loss of Kith and Kin, is Vera, a new Spanish-influenced restaurant in the West Loop.

I had an inkling Vera might be special. Even in this era of the fresh-faced celebrity-chefs, cooks are often still pirates. Most restaurant kitchens run on guts, tenacity and muscle, not deep thought. Vera’s chef/owner Mark Mendez (formerly of Carnivale) always struck me as the antithesis to all that. He seems deliberate and sensitive and his cooking is clean and nuanced.

At Vera, Mendez has given new life to this vision.

Take for example, the blood sausage — the moist, inky black morcilla nested on a bed of honeycomb tripe so tender you mistake the offal strips for noodles. Or the olivada, an olive spread that lends a nutty, sumptuous bite to flaky black cod flanked by citrus-bursting mini-triangles of meyer lemon.

You might need a Spanish culinary dictionary to translate the menu, but by any name, the escabeche, a crisp plank of trout perked up with magenta-hued pickled celery and tender baby carrots from Genesis Growers in St. Anne, Illinois, is a tangy explosion of flavor.

Vera charges $6 for their bread — surefire restaurant suicide! But, after one bite of that crispy crust and cloudlike, bubble-filled interior, I realize these are some of the best dollars I’ve ever spent. And that’s before I dip the crust in the killer accompanying assortment of roasted garlic, duck crackling and goat butters.

This bread is best paired with some of Vera’s ruddy, white-fat-streaked Cinco Jotas cured pig shoulder. Though I know this sounds like the pining of a pretentious wine writer, the fat on the ham is redolent with acorn, and the meat has the most delightfully pungent funk. Such funk is well-paired with a glass of Terre Nere Nerello Mascalese, a Sicilian red featuring a wild, fermented-cherry top note. Mendez and his wife Elizabeth (the former wine director at Carnivale) have created one of the most fearless, affordable and food-friendly wine lists I’ve seen in a long time.

Saving money on wine allows me to splurge on the paella, a huge black saucer of saffron and garlic-infused al dente rice swaddling rare bits of juicy duck and rabbit. Paella is often heavy, but Mendez tosses in pickled peppers, whose acidity lifts the dish. My concern, and it should be noted, my only concern with Vera, is that though the rice is cooked properly, there are no extra-crispy bits at the bottom of the pan offering the textural contrast found in the most superlative versions.

Vera is not built on meat alone. Though I am an unrepentant carnivore, my favorite dish here is a cazuela featuring buttery sweet-spiced squash puree coddling a pool of local honey and crispy bits of Marcona almonds. Coming in a close second is a mound of hen-of-the-woods and shiitake mushrooms perfumed with thyme and served over swooshes of roasted herb and cream-laden mushroom sauce.

Currently, Vera is light on dessert options, but that just provides more excuse to sample the incredible cheeses. My waiter breezily walks me through the characteristics of all nine cheeses on the menu. Props to him for steering us to the superb stinky raw-cow’s milk Hooligan.

Though I haven’t said much about the service, it is spectacular. On a separate visit, a waitress spits out wine knowledge like an IBM-engineered sommelier supercomputer.

With such a strong wine focus, Vera was originally supposed to be named Uva, a nod to the Spanish word for “grape.” Because of potential trademark infringement, the name now honors chef Mendez’s grandmother. (It should also be noted that “ver” is the latin root for “true.”) I can think of nothing more apropos, for, Vera is without gimmicks. The dining room is stark, but warm.

Foremost, the Mendez’s single-minded pursuit of what’s good over what might attract diners makes Vera one of the truest restaurants I’ve ever eaten at in Chicago.

Michael Nagrant is a local free-lance writer. E-mail the Sun-Times Dining section at diningout@suntimes.com with questions and comments.

Escape from Carnivale 

Vera, the little Spanish wine bar from longtime Carnivale vets, celebrates simplicity

click to enlarge

• JOE BACHMANN
• Mackerel escabeche with romesco sauce

I kicked off a seven-day Thanksgiving binge with my second visit to Vera, the highly anticipated Spanish wine bar from former Carnivale husband-and-wife team Mark (chef) and Elizabeth (sommelier) Mendez. It was a prelude in stark contrast with the subsequent digestive tsunami of chili dogs, french fries, pepperoni bread, tater tots, beef jerky, cheese popcorn, deep-fried stuffing balls, sour-cream mashed potatoes, chocolate-pecan pie, bourbon, rye, more bourbon, Bloody Marys, and, of course, turkey. The only greenery I ingested was a chopped salad dressed with a bacon vinaigrette that my twisted sister spiked with a half g's worth of Splenda.

I didn't eat anything like that at Vera. Well, it's a stretch, but there was the green romesco sauce smeared under the chef's mackerel escabeche, the briny, oily fish crisp and lightened and brightened by the acid-washed radiance of the sauce. The memory of it cut through the fog that descended after a week of heavy American comforts.

Vera is likely to have a similar effect on lots of diners. Mark Mendez recently told the Reader, "I don't do subtle food." And even before leaving Jerry Kleiner's Carnivale, he made much of his desire to cook simply, from scratch, with premium, local-if-possible products, something he struggled with but still accomplished with impressive regularity at the 600-seat juggernaut.

Now, in an environment with a radically decreased volume in both production and decibels, that approach bears out consistently across a mutating menu, on which prices are low and a great many of the small plates prove to be truly shareable. Despite that, it's the sort of place that will attract solo diners to the bar for cheese and cured meats. But they'll face significant hurdles if they expect to sample a representative cross-section of the menu in one sitting.

A whole meal could indeed be made simply from a few glasses of leathery Black Slate garnacha and the chef's tripe, morcilla, and garbanzos, an offal plate so textured and soulful I had to order it on two separate visits. It's a dish whose disparate elements are harmonized perfectly—crispy iron-fortified sausage coins spread across nutty legumes that mingle with the silky, funky flavor sponge of the honeycomb reticulum absorbing the tomatoey sofrito.

It's possible to gorge on substantially meaty plates such as this at astonishing value—a crispy baseball-size beef-stuffed potato croquette in a puddle of gazpacho-like salmorejo sauce is a mere $4. A pair of chubby, garlicky lamb chorizos on a glistening bed of roasted onions and greens will set you back $12.

But a proper paella is a rare species in this town, and I was let down just a bit by Vera's unusual version of this most iconic of Spanish dishes. The absorbent fat-saturated bomba rice, larded with shreds of rabbit meat and slices of duck breast (a winning application for such an overfamiliar protein), is given acidity from pickled cherry bomb peppers, and is certainly tasty. Mine lacked only the crispy socorrat that's scraped up from the bottom of the pan to give the dish its essential texture. Still, at $26 it's a satisfying pan of grains that would easily feed three.

I'm most excited to see what Mendez does with vegetables as the seasons change. Right now he's roasting: turnips softened and buttery, electrified by a sprinkling of espelette pepper, mushrooms scattered over smooth fungal puree, beets tossed in a blue cheese and pistachio "butter"—winter vegetables in their proper context.

But like the escabeche, the fish dishes are some of the most vivid, almost springlike in their buoyancy: a formation of cured anchovies dressed minimally with pickled garlic and vegetal celery leaves; black cod fillet topped with green olive tapenade spiked with lemon zest; a tangle of grilled octopus inflamed with smoky pimentón; a crock of light, fluffy bacalao, the cod unburdened by the usual preponderance of potato.

There's no dessert menu at Vera, which, intentionally or not, places the focus on the cheese selection, with a healthy midwestern representation served at the proper ambient temperature. It's best to save these for last anyway, if only to start with bread and butter: a dense boule accompanied by three luscious compound butters—roasted garlic, duck cracklings, and goat—along with a pool of outstanding peppery Spanish Castillo de Canena olive oil. Charging for bread service still tends to spark an instinctive annoyance in me, particularly when there are so many precious sauces to sop up. But for $6 it's a steal.

I've been dwelling a lot on the chef's food at the expense of the sommelier's selections. This is primarily a wine bar, after all, and Elizabeth Mendez's affordable, unusual list— which includes wines from underrepresented regions (Portugal, Switzerland) and a impressive range of sherries by the glass—is reason enough to venture to this West Loop corner in the shadow of the Green Line. It's going to be thrilling to watch her and her husband fully express themselves in ways they never could as soldiers in the erstwhile Kleiner Empire.

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