BLG

The only restaurant that redeems the North Loop

Bar La Grassa announces itself with a stack of red, circus letters that read B-L-G and hover above Washington Ave. The signage is only the first thing that sets it apart from johnny-come-lately establishments such as Freehouse and Borough that are more indicative of the North Loop’s anonymous, tech-bro vibe.

Mostly, the North Loop is a neighborhood where affluent, young couples consume pricey bagels, shop at Madewell, and walk large, designer dogs back to one bedroom apartments. The district feels like a Google campus without a Google office. Lee and I might avoid the North Loop entirely if it weren’t the single nightlife spot we can visit without fighting traffic. Our excursions revolve around an indulgent pragmatism, and Bar La Grassa, which predates its neighbors, has become a favorite.

The restaurant’s interior is shadowy and warm. As you enter, you encounter a front-room bar to the right of the host station that looks like a movie set from the late 80s and seems perpetually full of affable boomers. I don’t know if I would want to, or be allowed, to sit at this bar, so take it as a festive, architectural antipasti. In the dining room, dark wooden chairs surround marble-topped tables. The vibe is rustic-chic. The main bar, facing out from an open kitchen, consists of this same marble.

Food is served in grandmotherly, farm-scene bowls. When these bowls arrive on the sleek bar-top, there is a hint of a joke. You detect a sensibility that pings off the circus letters out front and suggests BLG is a place where you can take yourself seriously because you are provided the requisite humor to do so. This attitude is most apparent in the lobster and eggs bruschetta, a celebrated menu staple, that has a quality of striking culinary dynamite at 3am in the kitchen of the mansion where you’re house-sitting. This recklessness succeeds because the traditional dishes--spaghetti, gnocchi, risotto--manage to be so flavorful and elegant.

Lee and I first visited in late November, when it was newly cold and the city’s lakes turned to ice. We split a bruschetta with charred red onion and goat cheese, a mushroom and taleggio agnolotti, and tiramisu for dessert. In the charred red onion I thought I tasted centuries of cast iron. In the mushroom pasta, we felt warmed by a nonexistent fireplace. Such was each dish’s aura. I pictured becoming a BLG menu completist, and have made headway on three subsequent occasions.

Our first visit took place the night before Thanksgiving, traditional night of hanging with high school pals. It was the rare night that BLG wasn’t packed. You don’t go to BLG to celebrate the oldness of the old, you go to cheer the old’s chance at becoming new. Coincidentally, this was why Lee and I were there. We were deep in adaptations after another professional move, on the heels of losses and dissolutions, not so much the part of life where you understand you can’t go home again, but the part where you know home no longer exists. We didn’t say this out loud, but our dates last fall were about navigating these things.

In other words, we brought the loneliness; BLG provided the romance and the humor. The name “Bar La Grassa” references the excellence of Bolognese cuisine, but 5000 miles from Bologna, I’m more enamored of its literal translation: Cafe of the Fat One. When the tiramisu arrived, the bartender was kind enough to split a final glass of wine into two cups. Lee put her arm around me. We laughed because we were the fat ones. Fat with context, and with chapters. Fat with fleeting cosmopolitan possibility.

At BLG you can imagine ancient foodways that exist only in the present, just as you can long for a home that never was. The North Loop is a no-place that could be dropped into any city. BLG, meanwhile, is a no-place that has dreamed itself into this place. Being in this place--isn’t that what we’re always trying to do?