A Mano335 N. Dearborn | 312-629-3500
$$$Asian, Japanese | Dinner: seven days | Open late: Friday & Saturday till 2, other nights till 11:30
Cafe 1031909 W. 103rd | 773-238-5115
When Kurt Serpin says he’s cooking Ottoman cuisine he doesn’t mean the extravagant feasts of the sultans, but he is talking about the traditional national cuisine that developed in their expansive palace kitchens. The menu in his compact Lakeview restaurant is certainly expansive, covering the expected mezes—hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanoush, falafel—kebabs, and grilled seafood dishes (Serpin is from the Turkish city of Mersin, on the Mediterranean), but also a nice selection of less common items, like the pre-Ottoman, tiny wontonlike meat dumplings known as manti, which arrive in a deep bowl of yogurt-tomato sauce. (Serpin says it takes him and his wife eight hours to stuff enough for 25 orders.) He’s also doing alabalik, rainbow trout cooked with mozzarella cheese; balik sarma, or grilled grape-leaf-wrapped sardines, and mercimek koftesi, spicy, cold lentil fingers that are a vegetarian approximation of the cig kofte, raw meatballs served at nearby Nazarlik. No processed gyros cone spins in this place. Serpin, who’s cooked at A la Turka and the late Cafe Istanbul, stacks the meat on the Autodoner himself and shaves it for doner kebab or iskender, a luscious, comforting dish of shaved lamb, veal, and house-baked bread, smothered in butter, yogurt, and tomato sauce. —Mike Sula
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$$$ Bar/Lounge | Small Plates, American Contemporary/Regional | Dinner: Sunday, Tuesday-Saturday | Closed Monday | Open late: Friday & Saturday till 2
Koko Sushi & Leveche3140 N. Lincoln | 773-248-2988
