CHICAGO (WLS) -- There aren't many restaurants in the city charging $200 a head, allowing you to bring your own wine and pay up front. But the business plan isn't completely crazy.
42 grams is a very personal project, led by a husband-and-wife team. They cook for just eight or 10 people at two seatings per night, in a space below their apartment. The cooking is modern, expensive and creative, but ultimately delicious.
Eight guests sit at a counter, watching their dinner being assembled. They've all brought their own wine to 42 grams, hidden in an Uptown apartment near the Red Line, and have already paid online. They're about to embark on a 14-course adventure, thanks to a team of three chefs, led by Jake Bickelhaupt, a veteran of Charlie Trotter's, Alinea and Schwa.
"Trotter's was get it done attitude. Alinea was very precise and learned how to do things with precision, and timing was very important and Schwa was just like, come as you are attitude and have a great time," Bickelhaupt said.
If Bickelhaupt runs the kitchen, his wife Alexa runs front-of-the-house, commanding your attention with her precision descriptions of everything you're about to put into your mouth.
"That is a salmon skin that has been fried up like a chicharron, dusted with malt vinegar and potato..." she explained to the eight guests, referring to a starter of snacks.
With each course - whether it's a re-imagined, edible cocktail, or matchsticks of salt-cured tuna, topped with an asparagus gelato, paired with tiny dollops of sea buckthorn fruit and apricot kernels - Alexa goes into great detail, giving you new respect for what her husband has created. Take this partial description of the "study in cucumber," which begins with shaved English cucumbers compressed with Japanese citrus and cucumber blossoms.
"At the bottom of your dish you're going to find an intense reduction of prawn - that is the orange that you see. As you eat through you might find what looks like a little micanite, that is a lettuce drop, it will taste mildly of cucumber. If you're smelling dill, there is dill pollen. Jake has taken dill pickles and grilled them; there's probably one sitting on top of one of your English cucumbers. And then the strawberries - those have been marinated in a banyuls vinegar to intensify the acidity and then grilled, which I think enhances the sweetness," she said, without missing a beat.
Bickelhaupt says it's a good thing he lives upstairs, since work and life are one in the same.
"It's been a blast but like I said it's been a lot of work but anything worth doing isn't easy, right?" he said.
42 grams
4662 N. Broadway