Virtue
Virtue ranks thirteenth because Williams has built a restaurant with moral clarity as well as culinary excellence — it knows where it comes from and is proud of both.
On East 53rd Street, within sight of the University of Chicago, Virtue is the kind of restaurant that changes how a neighborhood understands itself. Chef Erick Williams's menu is rooted in Black Southern cooking — short ribs that have been properly tended, shrimp and grits that don't condescend to the dish, cornbread that arrives as architecture rather than afterthought — but it is not nostalgic. It is proud and current, using a serious kitchen's full technique in service of a cuisine that has too often been underserved by fine-dining ambitions.
The room is warm and spacious, the bar program is strong, and the service carries the particular quality Williams has described as hospitality as a form of respect. The Michelin star is deserved. More important, Virtue has become a neighborhood institution for Hyde Park in the way that only the best restaurants do — not just a destination but a place with a genuine stake in where it sits.
- Braised short ribs
- Shrimp and grits
- Cast-iron cornbread
