First look at dishes from Randolph Street's Tete Charcuterie

Photo: Michael Gebert

By: Michael Gebert | March 24, 2014 | ChicagoReader.com

Many of the restaurants that have popped up in the Randolph Street meatpacking district seek to create a little oasis of glamour in the midst of food-industry grittiness. Tete Charcuterie wants you to remember where you are and what they do for a living here. The meat-focused restaurant, which is in soft opening now and will have its official opening April 7, is located in an old meatpacking facility which has been renovated to call attention to its bones—the thick wooden floors and iron beams of a decades-old plant. The menu of coexecutive chefs Thomas Rice and Kurt Guzowski deliberately evokes the food found around markets in places like France and Italy, food that takes simple cuts and scraps and turns them into artful, deeply meaty patés and sausages. Those dishes make no effort to hide their butcher-shop origins, so the restaurant doesn't either—the line and charcuterie cases are open to the dining room, and during service you may see the staff grinding and making sausage. Read More...