Sepia's interior. Photo from official website. Sepia restaurant in Chicago's West Loop is a testament to the success that can come from having a vision and sticking to it. While the idea of having one foot in the past and one foot in the future sounds like a bad tag line for a time-travel company, this is precisely the thing that makes Sepia, now more than a year old, still one of Chicago's hottest restaurants. Owner Emmanuel Nony has stuck to his guns and successfully melded mod and old, whether it's in the interior design featuring crystal chandeliers shaded by spacey screens or the website theme music, which features a trip-hop remix of Billie Holiday crooning "God Bless the Child."...
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Sometimes you just want to give the clueless a beat down. Monday night, I'm sitting at the Sepia restaurant bar, sipping one of bartender Peter Vestinos's Fig and Almond Old Fashioneds (fig- and almond-infused Woodford Reserve bourbon, fig and cranberry bitters, muddled cherries, and oranges). Vestinos infuses the bourbon with figs for four days and adds the almonds in the last 24 hours to capture their essence without transforming the liquor into Amaretto. The cranberry bitters are homemade, too. As I sipped and perused a long list of amazing cocktails made with fresh ingredients and homemade concoctions, wave after wave of people order vodka. It might as well be a bathhouse in Moscow. You got guys trying to flash their...
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