Whatever, it was great, a cool red-pepper salad that paired nicely with the tzatziki. The real standouts, however, were two dishes with no Israeli connection at all: a spring-onion tzatziki that tasted like French onion dip (I mean that as a compliment) and htipiti, a spread the server told me was Ethiopian (a quick online search reveals it’s Greek). I tried plain hummus for my first dinner and it tasted like it came right from Trader Joe’s, but the “spicy hummus” I had the second time was much better, thick and creamy with a nice harif-style spice. The spreads are the most consistently pleasurable, indicative of Ema’s potential.
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The menu is divided up into various sections of small plates plus a couple of main courses. It isn’t just a “hotel restaurant,” though patrons have to go past the check-in counters, then through what is apparently a service hallway in order to access the restrooms. The decor is impressive considering that Ema is located virtually inside of the lobby of a Hyatt Hotel. It sounds like it too-the din of blase EDM and the loud chatter of douchebags drown out any possibility of having an audible conversation.
In other words, it looks almost exactly like LEYE’s Summer House Santa Monica. Located on a stretch of River North where the skunky smell of Axe body spray is only marginally less prevalent than it is in other parts of the neighborhood, Ema is bright and spacious, with exposed brick walls painted white, wooden furnishings and columns, and leafy branches on the ceilings. Yet as is typical of an LEYE project, any sense of exoticism or ethnic variety is downplayed to near nonexistence.
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Jacobson, fresh off of a stint at the inaugural helm of LEYE’s rotating-restaurant concept Intro, spent time in Israel as a professional volleyball player. The city could use one-aside from Skokie’s Taboun Grill, a pious kosher spot that’s closed on Saturdays, and local small-scale fast-food chains Benjyehuda and Naf Naf Grill, Chicago is lacking a quality outlet for Israeli cuisine, a mashup of Middle Eastern staples and eastern-European fare brought over during the Jewish diaspora, with an emphasis on Israel’s bounty of fresh produce. But I was dying to eat there.īecause of its name, it’s fair to assume that Ema would be an Israeli eatery. I texted my family in haste: They stole our idea! “We waited too long,” my brother wrote. The cuisine would be “Mediterranean.” There were pictures of hummus and fresh vegetables on the signs-the food looked Israeli. So imagine my surprise when I turned the corner of Clark and Illinois and saw the announcements for a new restaurant from Lettuce Entertain You called, of all things, Ema. And we’d name the new establishment after the queen of our household, the Hebrew word for “mom”: ema.
There’d be the “Get Out of Bed” chicken soup, the “Please Pray for Parking” schnitzel, and of course, the “Water the Garden” salad. We wanted to open a restaurant that would showcase my Israeli mother’s cooking, and we’d name all the dishes after her. My family and I used to have an inside joke.
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