Bluegrass

Bayou on one page, pit barbecue on the next, and somehow the kitchen nails both. Work had me north of Chicago on a Tuesday, and a couple of the guys I work with needed dinner as much as I did. Bluegrass sits on Old Deerfield Road on the west side of Highland Park, a stone-and-stucco building with a broad flat roof and a relatively small lot for a place so incredibly loved. Jim and Joni Lederer opened it in 2004 and still run it together, Jim in the kitchen and Joni out front. Joni is a pip and Jordan answering the phone is all smiles. The menu reads like a map of the South: Cajun and Creole, real Texas-style pit barbecue, and a few detours into everything else. That kind of range usually means a kitchen doing a lot of things halfway. This one does them right.

The Vibe

We sat on the patio out front on a perfect Chicago late-afternoon, a spread of tables under blue umbrellas behind a stone planter wall. The pics are when we first got there a little after 5. It was full very shortly after. Inside, the room is warm wood and gold walls, a long bar with blue-cushioned stools, and a dining room broken up by cut-mirror panels, with acoustic baffles hung from the ceiling. Those baffles are there for a reason. By 6:20 the place was packed, patio and room both, on a Tuesday. Make a reservation. I’m not suggesting it, I’m telling you.

The Food

The BBQ shrimp came first, and it’s New Orleans BBQ shrimp, which means butter and pepper, not anything off a grill. Big tail-on shrimp in a buttery sauce with a little zip, over rice that was cooked perfectly and soaked up every bit of it. The mushroom broil was the other appetizer: wild and domestic mushrooms over garlic bread with Alfredo and Gruyère. The sauce soaked clean through the bread, and the mushrooms kept their texture instead of going limp in the cream. Gruyère was the right call. It brings a nutty bite that keeps the dish from becoming cream on cream.

Then the étouffée. It’s a smooth, burnished sauce with real depth from the roux, crawfish flavor running all the way through and a bite that builds at the end. It hard to say what was the best thing I ate all night, but that meal is terrific.

I had to try the ribs, so I added a half slab. They’re dry rubbed and hickory smoked, and the smoke is restrained, so the pork and the rub come through. The sauce looked to me like it gets crisped on over the heat and then glossed again before it goes out, which gives you charred edges and a wet shine at the same time. It’s a traditional barbecue sauce, and it tastes like one. The texture was exactly what I want from a rib: a slight tug, then it comes away clean.

Both of the guys I was with ordered the corned beef brisket platter, dry rubbed and smoked for more than 12 hours, then served open face on garlic bread with barbecue sauce and red onion. They aren’t food people, and at the table the verdict was simply “really good.” The corn pudding on the side got a bigger reaction. Eric had never had corn pudding before, and he liked it. The brisket’s real review came later. Halfway back to the hotel, out of nowhere, one of them said, “Man, that was good brisket.” When a guy who doesn’t think about food is still thinking about it twenty minutes later, the kitchen did its job.

The Bottom Line

Five plates, two cuisines, no misses. The étouffée and the ribs could each carry a restaurant on their own, and Bluegrass serves them from the same kitchen. This is a Not Our Local I wish were my local. If it sat in Northern Kentucky, I’d be on that patio every Tuesday. Worth the Drive. And get a reservation, because everyone else on the North Shore already knows.