Eat Out Chicago!Kitsune Restaurant and Pub
Kitsune is a Japanese ramen restaurant inspired by Midwestern bounty and influenced by home-style Japanese cuisine located in Chicago. It comes from Iliana Regan, the James Beard nominated chef of Elizabeth Restaurant.
Kitsune Restaurant and Pub
At Elizabeth, her lauded first restaurant, Regan gained notoriety for her devotion to local Midwestern ingredients.
That she has never visited the country could be seen as an insurmountable obstacle, but Regan, who grew up on an Indiana farm, taps into the flavor combinations that fascinate her, and the results (an onsen egg floating in a dashi studded with bright-red flower petals, ramen made with nettles aswirl in a basso profundo mushroom broth) are as delicious to slurp as they are lovely to Instagram.
Even though the studied and occasionally menacing woodland twee is dialed back, it’s still lurking in the shadows waiting for the right moment to surprise you...an exploration of the intersection of Japanese culinary technique and kitchen canon, with midwestern ingredients and guided by her own idiosyncratic sensibility... Kitsune is Regan’s expression of what it would be like to open a restaurant if the Japanese had occupied Chicago for the last 70 years.
Her kitchen, a collaboration with Justin Behlke, relies on Midwestern ingredients for its ramen, which plumbs uncharted depths of flavor with rich pork belly, a perfect soft-boiled egg, a spicy homemade chili sauce, and scallions in a thick tonkotsu broth.
The bread service is a thing of beauty; it's a wild rice and porridge bread, served as four wide, thick slices alongside pickled vegetables (no two vegetables pickled quite the same way) and a smear of house-cultured butter that, if you look closely, is shaped like a fox.