Day 11: Wine Dinner at Tramonto Steak

One of the perks of my job is that I get to report on the dining scene in Chicago and sometimes this means going to fancy restaurants. Last night, I attended a wine dinner at Tramonto Steak and Seafood, a Las Vegas-style steakhouse in a culinary wasteland known as Wheeling, a northern suburb. (Actually, one of Chicago's pioneering fine-dining spots is also in Wheeling -- Le Francais, but it's possibly closed now.) The guest winemaker was a friendly older gentleman named Josh Jensen, who owns and operates a winery in the central coast of California called Calera; check out his foxy picture here.

The set-up was boffo, not surprising since this was a Belinda Chang event. Note the obscene number of glasses.



Belinda is a curious creature. A sommelier and the wine director for a well-regarded restaurant corporation, she is in her early 30s and went to college intending to become a doctor. Somewhere along the way, she fell in love with the restaurant life and, defying her parents, became a waiter then a sommelier and never looked back. What's great about Belinda is that she has the nose-to-the-grindstone discipline of a medical student and the up-all-night stamina of an ER doctor combined with an exuberant enthusiasm for wine and the stories that go with them. My understanding is that Josh Jensen is one of her very favorite winemakers and the sommeliers at the table (including Alpana Singh, and the sommeliers for Frontera Grill and Spiaggia) were crowing about the fact that Calera occupies a rare bit of terroir: Apparently, the plot is one of the few wine-producing areas in the United States near natural limestome deposits, making the wines taste like those from France.

The dinner was a six courser. [EDITOR'S NOTE: This is wrong; it was actually a seven course dinner. I forgot about the sweetbreads dish, aka thymus gland, here served with eggplant dumplings and ricotta salata. Chef-date and I agreed that the glands were delicious but that there was something kind of off about the dish as a whole.]

1) Heirloom tomato tart appetizer. I thought the crust was too rich.
2) A macerated hunk of hamachi on top of cucumber gelee. Anise hyssop in there somewhere. And caviar. A flop.
3) Putty-colored foie gras, cut from a log. Melon brunoise and brioche toast. Rich but not that interesting.
4) A honkin' seared scallop under a cloud of bacon emulsion and nestled in a bright yellow puddle of corn puree. My date, a city chef, remarked that the dish could have used a touch of herb. I thought it was YUMMY.



5) Beef tenderloin with fennel jam on cranberry beans. The chef-date astutely noted that the 2006 pinot noir, which had a candied taste, brought out the licorice notes in the fennel condiment.
6) Chocolate pudding thing, very cold, set on top of cookie crumbles that were like homemade Oreos. Cocoa-dusted Goji berries, whatever the hell those are (chef-date thought they were raisins at first), and thin slices of plum that were soaked in something delicious and tasted like bananas. In a word, YUMMY.



We left shortly after the dinner finished, but the sommeliers started busting out new bottles of wine and kept partying, one would like to imagine, long into the night.